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 […]
I have published this week not one but TWO books gathering works written by my students. As I have been narrating here, I started publishing students’ work back in 2013-14, when I edited two volumes on Harry Potter. I became then hooked on project-oriented teaching for BA and MA subjects, mostly electives, and these new […]
Happy 2025! May it brings the world the peace we so much need and is at least marginally better than we expect right now, three days before the second inauguration of President Trump (President Musk? President Trusk? President Mump?). First, a confession: I’m distracted this semester with other personal and professional matters and I’m finding […]
I have written here at least twice about introductions. Back in 2011 (how time passes!!), I wrote a post about the introductions to British drama, which I was then teaching, and then in 2017 another post about Scottish literature. My point was similar and it is still similar today: no matter how brief the introduction, […]
The GoodReads Choice Awards for 2024 were published three days ago and this is, then, the right time to take a look and see what they say about the platform and its readers. The most obvious implicit statement is that this is a heavily biased platform, with a very high presence of US readers and […]
[This is a really complicated semester, with lots to mark and edit, and pressing personal issues, which explains why I’m being so irregular in my supposedly weekly posting. Apologies!] Today I’m writing about writers and my parasitical syndrome. You may have heard of impostor syndrome (feeling you’re underqualified for a task you’re doing proficiently) and […]
The experiment I am running in the fourth-year core subject Contemporary Fiction in English is progressing well, but there are some snags that I’d like to address here. Here we go, then. We have now finished Unit 1 (1990-1997) and have started Unit 2 (1998-2006) and even though most students have finished reading the […]
I have shared in class with my students the article by Gaby Hinsliff’s “I Fear Books Are Going the Way of Vinyl Records – A Rarefied Pursuit for Hobbyists” published in The Guardian a couple of months ago. This article begins as the typical piece on summer reading to take then a turn towards the […]
I’m writing today in the hopes of better developing an idea I didn’t have time to expand on in class yesterday. I have been thinking about the meaning of the ‘contemporary’, both in the sense of how we consume books and which layers (I will explain) compose the totality of books at our disposal. […]
It turns out I have published 30 reviews, all of them of academic books, and I have two more about to be issued, which amounts more or less to one per year on average in the 33 years I have been an academic. For me, the most memorable for me is, no doubt, my […]