Prince Harry’s memoirs Spare were published only six days ago but it is already difficult to have something new to say about them, given the flood of opinion articles and blog posts that has greeted them. I’ll try, though. I’ll begin by noting that I remain flabbergasted by two things: that this man still […]
Next semester I will teaching an MA subject on popular music and masculinity as a sort of sequel to the BA course I taught last year which led to the publication of the collective e-book by the students Songs of Empowerment: Women in 21st Century Popular Music (downloadable for free). I wrote a post presenting […]
Queen Elizabeth II passed away last Thursday, 8 September, and in the following days we have seen a public demonstration of sorrow that gives no signs of abating. The state funeral scheduled for Monday 19 will mark a climax and put a formal end to the second Elizabethan era, though it is still to be […]
It’s evening, after dinner, time to relax and choose a film to watch from whatever platform you subscribe. This means employing about two hours on consuming a story, leaving aside the fifteen minutes (or more) it may take to select a minimally enticing movie, unless you have preselected and placed some on your list. If […]
The one who should be writing this post today is my PhD student Pascal Lemaire since he has chosen to deal with the technothriller as his topic of research. However, I am myself curious about some of the points he is raising about this genre, so here I am. Back in 2014 Pascal published in […]
As I write, the Russian nuclear armament is ready to strike anywhere in, probably, the whole world and both the media and the social media are debating whether Russian President Vladimir Putin might eventually order a strike, and against whom. To the world’s amazement, the Ukrainians are still resisting and Kyiv has not fallen down […]
First, a note. This is the first post I publish on the date it has been written after four months of silence, caused by the cyberattack that affected the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on 11 October 2021 (the blog is hosted by UAB). I was confident that the texts were not lost, as I keep […]
This is, no doubt, the strangest post I have ever published, but pending the transformation by my students of this list into a Spotify list (as they promised), here is my selection of 20th century songs by women (in English). I am currently teaching a Cultural Studies course on women in pop, and instead of […]
This is the ten-minute talk I gave last week at the international conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, of which I spoke in my last post. Since we had been given such a short time, I used no secondary sources and focused directly on the two novels I discuss. I was a bit nervous […]
I’ve been attending these days in fits and starts the Science Fiction Research Association’s international conference, conditioned by the six-hour difference with Toronto, where the hosting institution (Seneca College) is located. Fifteen months into the pandemic I needn’t say how impossible it is to listen to anybody speak on Zoom, or similar, without either multitasking […]