I attended yesterday the talk at Barcelona’s Festival 42 by US horror author Grady Hendrix, a man who looks disconcertingly like actor Brady Cooper’s brother or cousin. Hendrix has made a name for himself as an author who combines the gruesome, the shocking, and the humorous in his novels, though I must confess that I […]
A week ago, the research group I currently belong to, Beyond Postmemory, held the seminar “Nature Remembers: War, Trauma and Environmental Postmemory,” in which we discussed how not only human beings but also nature can suffer, so to speak, from PTSD and show signs of trauma long after a conflict. Postmemory, a concept coined by […]
Back in 1992, when I started writing the shorter dissertation in our doctoral programme (the equivalent of an MA dissertation, since we didn’t have yet MA programmes in Spain), I truly thought that my main field of research would be Adaptation Studies. My short dissertation dealt with the film adaptation of the novel by John […]
Today I’m inspired by an article published by Mariana Valverde (Professor Emeritus, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto) in The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly (76.RS, 2025: 1-8, https://doi.org/10.53386/nilq.v76iRS.1195). The article is called “How the Academy Negatively Affects Writing Practice” and is part of an issue devoted entirely to writing (https://nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/nilq/issue/view/134). No, I’m […]
Today I’m using my post as an excuse to read an article titled “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia” by Olivia Guest and 18 other authors based mostly in the Netherlands. This text can be found in a pre-print repository (https://philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU) where it was filed on 7 September of the current year. […]
Today I’m reading an article by, I quote, “Mary Curnock Cook CBE, who chairs the Dyson Institute and is a Trustee at HEPI, and Bess Brennan, Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus, which is running a series of collaborative events with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.” […]
I was supposed to take part in a seminar next week, which I’ll have to miss, with a talk about how to use AI correctly. In this talk I was going to describe, once more, how the late Iain M. Banks presents AI in his Culture novels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series). The Culture is a post-scarcity, […]
Sooo….. I asked ChatGPT after failing to find the information on Google about two matters. Here we go… I wrote: “I have read an academic book by Christopher Gillie called Characters in English Literature (1965), which has no bibliography. When did it become compulsory for academic books to have a bibliography or a works cited […]
I’m beginning to read (and in some cases re-read) the bibliography for my future book on secondary characters. I wish I could jump straight into the matter that interests me, for which there is relatively scant bibliography, but I need for my theoretical framework in the introduction an overview of the secondary sources discussing the […]
I was told yesterday that I must bear in mind that not all of our students agree with the left-wing political position I defend, as a feminist and a socialist, and that some actually support right-wing policies. This is hardly surprising if we take into account voting statistics and the growth of the extreme right […]