The Joys of Teaching Literature, started in September 2010 and with a Spanish version since July 2021, is a blog for ranting and raving about (teaching and researching) English Literature, Cultural Studies, and Gender Studies, and other aspects of the Anglophone world. I publish a post once a week, usually on Monday. Please, download the yearly volumes from https://ddd.uab.cat/record/116328, or read the volume collecting some of the entries (Passionate Professing: The Context and Practice of English Literature, 2023). The comments option is not available, sorry, but you may contact me through my e-mail address, Sara.Martin@uab.cat. The contents of this blog are protected by a type 4 Creative Common License (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (by-nc-nd)).

  • THE VAGARIES OF JOURNAL RATINGS (AND HOW YOUR OWN WORK MAY CHANGE QUALITY WITHOUT YOU LIFTING A FINGER)

    A colleague tells me that she’s very disappointed as a prestige journal where she published an article has now been demoted from the A list to the B list (in the ANECA check-lists, I think). She is really annoyed that when the time comes to pass her research assessment exercise this will affect her negatively.…

  • ‘BOLOGNA WELL APPLIED’: WHAT WAS NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT YEARS BACK

    One of our students is spending her Erasmus year abroad in Dublin. She visits me during her reading week break and when I ask her what’s it like there, she tells me it’s “Bologna well applied.” I smile at her candid verdict, cringing inwardly, and ask her what she means. Well, this year she’s being…

  • CONSIDERING RESEARCH AND NATIONALITY (AND THE PROMPTINGS OF AN ILLUSTRIOUS VISITOR)

    The research group I belong to, led by Àngels Carabí of UB and devoted to the study of masculinities in American fiction, received last Friday an illustrious visitor: Prof. Victor Seidler, an emeritus teacher of social theory at Goldsmiths in London (although he trained originally as a philosopher). I owe Prof. Seidler an important insight…

  • RECONSIDERING JEKYLL AND HYDE ONCE MORE: ON PERSONALITY DISSOCIATION

    This is the third post I write here on Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, which shows that a masterpiece is that kind of text that delivers something new every time the reader approaches it. In preparation for my classes, I read Nancy Gish’s essay “Jekyll and Hyde: The Pathology of…

  • WHAT WE TEACH, WHAT WE DON’T TEACH: SOME THOUGHTS (AND A NEW COLLABORATION)

    I start here a little experiment: a series of, in principle, 5 collaborations with Cristina García Leitón, a student taking a combined BA in Spanish and English. Cristina runs her own blog, http://palabrascomosouvenir.blogspot.com.es/, and when I saw that she has a little subsection called ‘Aventuras y desventuras de una filóloga en proceso’ (within her Literature…