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)).

  • GETTING PUBLISHED: SOME ADVICE FOR BEGINNERS (ON ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS)

    This text is based on the seminar presentation I have prepared for the doctoral students in the PhD programme in English Studies of my Department. It is published here in case some other PhD student finds it useful. ‘Why publish and should I…?’, you may be wondering. Publication is an essential aspect of academic life:…

  • RETHINKING THE PLACE OF DOCUMENTARY FILMS AND WONDERING ABOUT ACTING

    I wrote my last post about a documentary film and I was not really thinking of continuing with the same topic but I came across a very interesting article by Carlos Lara, “¿Debería poder ganar un documental el Goya a Mejor Película?” (“Should a documentary film win the Goya to Best Film?”) so, here I…

  • SHAME OF THE NATION: ON WATCHING EL SILENCIO DE OTROS

    It is habitual in scholarly work that a text illuminates another text quite by chance, in that phenomenon usually called serendipity. Reading the second edition of Sarah Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004, 2014) to fill in a serious gap in my list of books read, I have found myself considering in the light…

  • RESPECT THE TRANSLATOR!: AMANDA GORMAN AND THE INACCEPTABLE DISMISSAL OF HER CATALAN TRANSLATOR

    National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman (Los Angeles, 1988) became a world-wide celebrity two months ago, after her reading of her poem “The Hill We Climb” during President Joe Biden’s inauguration (on 6th January). I am not particularly interested in assessing her quality as a poet, which I find rather overvalued, but on criticizing the…

  • MEN AND MASCULINITY IN CINEMA: 103 BOOKS

    In case this might interest any scholars working on men and masculinity in cinema, here’s my bibliography of the field, from 1977 to 2020. The selection does not include many books on the filmographies in other languages than English, though there are some volumes that do deal with them and that are included here to…