I must thank my PhD supervisor in Scotland, Prof. David Punter, for inviting me to overcome my prejudice against the colourful covers of Terry Pratchett’s novels and kicking me head first into the Discworld. 17 years and 39 novels later I can only say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you…’ for so much literary pleasure. […]
Possibly, each anecdote deserves a separate entry but since they seem to be interconnected somehow, here they are together. I show a student where the plagiarised sentence she’s used comes from (a website) and she claims not to be aware of having copied –her defence is that the complete sentence stayed in her mind like […]
Today we have learned that our dear colleague Félix Ernesto Chávez, a member of our research group ‘Body and Textuality,’ was brutally murdered last Monday in the course of a burglary in México DC. Félix had arrived just two weeks ago to teach a course at UNAM and was staying with relatives. A man who […]
I do know that the correct word to name the document that describes a subject is “syllabus” but I’m using “teaching guide” here on purpose to discuss the new kind of syllabus we’ve been using since the beginning of our degree, three academic years ago. As degree Coordinator I’m facing now the daunting prospect of […]
I’m tempted to cut’n’paste my entry for 28 May 2011, written after marking a disastrous Literature quiz based on studying our handbook Introduction to English Literature. Yet, re-reading it, I notice that things are even worse this time around as, instead of 50 titles, the quiz covered only 20 –presumably those any self-respecting student of […]
I was quite surprised when a UAB doctoral student in the ‘Arts Escèniques’ programme run by the Catalan Department asked me to be the second internal examiner of a board that should meet at Warwick University. Surprised because a) I didn’t know her, b) I do not specialise in Theatre Studies (though I teach Theatre […]
I was leaving for home after a long, tiring day, depressed as I am these days at the thought of how hard the university is being hit by the current crisis, when a smiling colleague stopped me in the middle of the corridor. She’s an associate that teaches English Language and with whom I’ve only […]
I made the mistake of declaring to my family over lunch that I was very depressed as President Mas has decided to deduct yet another 5% off my wages, this time off the complement paid by the Generalitat (I’m a civil servant on the payroll of the Spanish Government). This unleashed not the sympathy one […]
I’ll be teaching again next year the elective ‘English Theatre’ and I’m reconsidering the texts I used 2 years ago. In that edition I asked my students to read two anthologies, Grahame Whybrow’s Modern Drama: Plays of the ’80s and ’90s and Alekz Seirz’s Twenty-First Century British Plays (both Methuen). 10 plays in total, 36 […]
To my surprise Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction (1979, English translation 1984), based on field work in late 1960s and early 1970s France, still makes perfect sense today. I don’t know whether this is because Spain is till catching up with the France he portrays, or because, essentially, Europe’s patterns of consumption have not changed that much […]