Irene Gassó i Lagares, a second-year PhD student in English Studies and member of the Beyond Postmemory research group, recently participated in the VII AEDEAN Doctoral Seminar. The event was hosted at the University of Cantabria, in Santander, from 1 to 3 July 2026.
Gassó i Lagares shared with fellow doctoral students and professors her doctoral project, titled Margaret Atwood’s Historiographic Metafiction: Questioning Official Misrepresentations of War through Historical and Speculative Fiction. The dissertation examines Margaret Atwood’s historical and speculative fiction through the lens of historiographic metafiction and postmemory. Irene Gassó’s research explores how Atwood employs historiographic metafiction across genres to interrogate representations of war, trauma, and the intergenerational transmission of memory, challenging triumphalist narratives of historical progress while revealing the cyclical persistence of violence and its enduring impact across generations.
The seminar brought together leading specialists in literature, including Rosario Arias and Sara Martín, whose feedback provided valuable insights that will contribute to the further development of the project.