Coordinators
Dr. Maria Rosa Garrido Sardà
She is Lecturer in English language and linguistics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Prior to joining the English studies at UAB, she taught a wide array of courses in English linguistics and sociolinguistics at the University of Lausanne, University of Fribourg, University of Luxembourg, Open University of Catalonia and International University of Catalonia. She coordinated the teaching innovation project “Multilingual Lausanne” (2018-2019) and has been involved in action research with adult migrants and adolescents in Catalonia.
Dr. Nicholas Spengler
He is Serra Húnter Fellow and Lecturer in American Literature at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. His primary research and teaching area is the literature and culture of the United States. Particular points of interest include: transnational and transcultural aspects of U.S. literature and culture; constructions of race, gender and sexuality; and the Environmental Humanities. Prior to joining the English Studies department at UAB, he was a teaching fellow at University College London.
Other team members
Dr. Clara Román Vanden Berghe
She is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she teaches History and Culture of the United States and American Literature. She has been a recipient of the Research Grant at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (Freie Universität, Berlin). Her research explores representations of intimacy, domesticity and communication in 20th-century North-American literature. Her primary interest resides in spatiality in literature with a focus on the construction of non-places. Her PhD thesis (2024) is entitled “Feel Myself Beloved on the Earth: The Destabilization and Restitution of Intimacy in the Stories of Raymond Carver”.
Dr Laura Gimeno-Pahissa
She is an associate professor of American Literature and Culture at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (U.A.B.). She also teaches Narratology and Contemporary Literature at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). She wrote her PhD on postbellum slave narratives and has received several scholarships such as a joint Fulbright Commission and U.S. Department of State scholarship at NYU (2008), and a doctoral research grant from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Institut für Nordamerikastudien, at the Freie Universität Berlin (2005 and 2006). Her research interests are mainly the representation of slavery in American fiction, and autobiographical writing.