Last evening I saw ‘La ratonera’ at Teatre Apolo, here in Barcelona, the Spanish translation of Agatha Christie’s very famous The Mousetrap. I am really mystified that this absolutely mediocre play, to call it something polite, is still on 62 years after its opening night. That is the real mystery and not what the plot […]
One doesn’t read doctoral dissertations for pleasure, I’m sorry to say, but I have very much enjoyed reading Linda Wight’s Talking about Men: Conversations about Masculinities in Recent ‘Gender-bending’ Science Fiction (2009, http://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/11566/1/02whole.pdf). She had the very good idea of taking a selection of winners and nominees to the James Tiptree Jr., a prize awarded […]
A friend explains to me that a tenured senior lecturer from another university has ‘borrowed’ her PhD dissertation –acknowledgements included– and submitted it as his own research for an award. How was he found out? Just by chance: someone in the judges panel had read my friend’s dissertation… This started a very paranoiac conversation about […]
This week my friend Bela Clúa has visited to introduce my students in the Harry Potter class to the basics of writing about heroes. She spoke to them about how heroic narratives have been famously studied by psychoanalysis (Carl Jung, Otto Rank) and by scholars interested in myth (Joseph Campbell, Northrop Frye). Next she mentioned […]
I’ve read back to back Frederick Douglass’ autobiography Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892) and Emmeline Pankhurst’s memoirs My Own Story (1914), just by chance. The first page of her volume already shows how closely connected both books are, for Pankhurst (1858-1928) was the daughter of British activists and she writes that […]
We live in the darkest times. As I wait for Putin to start WW III in Crimea, an article in El País catches my attention: “La caída de personal y financiación hace regresar al CSIC una década atrás” (http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2014/02/24/actualidad/1393271163_538095.html). CSIC, the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the sub-heading announces, has lost already 2,200 workers and […]
As I assumed it would happen, someone asks me what happens if during coffee with the teacher something else comes up. Actually she tells me her own story with an ex-teacher, now her romantic partner. This is my answer… the public one, the private is for her eyes only. I was once a member of […]
I’m preparing my lecture/seminar on J.K. Rowling, the author, for tomorrow and I have finally decided to turn to my blog, see if writing a post clarifies my confused thoughts. The idea is to discuss with my students what kind of writer Rowling is from a Cultural Studies point of view, taking into account her […]
I was having coffee with an American visiting scholar and a local colleague from UB, and, I’m not sure in what exact moment of the conversation, he asked whether we had the habit of taking coffee with students, meaning the teachers in each Department. My colleague quickly replied “no, we don’t” and I answered almost […]
I have started teaching my elective subject ‘Cultural Studies in English: The Harry Potter Series’ this week… and it’s been a very good beginning. I have around 50 students, of which 8 (I think) are auditors (non-registered students who get no credits); they come from BA degrees such as Translation or Anthropology and three are […]