An article by Tyler Jagt, published on 1 June 2026, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “My Students Can’t Read” has been creating a bit of a stir this past week and I’d like to comment on its gist. Jagt claims that his BA students’ inability to read a 20-page article (he teaches Rhetoric) […]
I’m three classes away from finishing (on 28 May) my third/fourth year BA elective subject ‘English Prose: 21st Century Autobiographies and Memoirs’ and I’ve been drafting my conclusions. I have decided to share them here, together with a couple of lists. Each class (80-90 minutes) has consisted of the following: a mini-lecture (35 minutes) […]
I was going to start writing my projected book on secondary characters, but then I realized that since it is not exclusively focused on English-language literature but on a selection of European novels in different languages, I might have problems presenting it in my next research assessment exercise (the board might value negatively my straying […]
It’s not at all usual for me to abandon an article at the writing stage, but today I’m giving myself permission. I’m sharing this misadventure in case you’ve also fallen down a rabbit hole and can’t climb out. Forgive me in advance for the long tale, I’m sort of exorcising this unfinished article from my […]
I’ve been busy these past weeks finishing the edition of a new e-book with 96 book reviews written by my undergrad students in the subject Contemporary English Literature, whose publication I’m very proud to announce: Reviewing Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Nonfiction, vol. II. You can check here the post I wrote last year about producing […]
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. […]