She is professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the University of Puerto Rico (for which, moreover, is a doctor honoris causa), deputy director of the Puerto Rican Academy of the Spanish and corresponding Language of the Royal Spanish Academy and the Dominican Academy of Language Spanish. He has been a professor and a visiting researcher at the universities of Harvard, Yale, Brown, Mexico, Buenos Aires, Rabat and the College of Spain in Salamanca, among others, and has held the Chair Emilio García Gómez at the University of Granada, the Chair Cortázar (Guadalajara, Mexico), the Chair Carlos Fuentes (University of Veracruz, Mexico) and the Chair Ernesto Cardenal (University of Managua), among others. He won a chair of Romance Languages ​​in opposition at the universities of Yale and Brown (1983) to return to serve in the University of his native Puerto Rico.

Among his many books are: San Juan de la Cruz and Islam (1985 and 1990); Traces of Islam in Spanish literature. Juan Goytisolo Juan Ruiz (1985-1989); A Spanish Kama Sutra (1992 and 1995); The sun at midnight. The mystical experience: tradition and modernity (1996, in collaboration with Lorenzo Piera); Sieges of the Ineffable. San Juan de la Cruz sings the transforming ecstasy (1998); The Wonderful Adventures of Buluqiya the confines of the Universe (2004); "A defense of your mark." The teaching of Semitic languages ​​at Salamanca in the time of St. John of the Cross (2006), and The Secret literature of the last Muslims in Spain (2009), the last five published in this same Publisher. He has also edited the Complete Works of St. John of the Cross (1991, in collaboration with Eulogio Pacho); Eroticism in Spanish letters (1995, in collaboration with Francisco Márquez Villanueva); Dwellings Hearts Abu-l-Hasan al-Nuri of Baghdad (Trotta, 1999), and Poems of the mystical way of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2002), among others.