In my Department’s recent meeting about the last batch of BA (or, as we call them, TFG) dissertations we have assessed, we already considered the possibility of suppressing them in the near future. This is not for us to decide, but we work on the assumption that, sooner or later, our school or UAB, if […]
I’ve had the honour of being a guest speaker at the seventh doctoral seminar that AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-norteamericanos) has organized at the Universidad de Cantabria, in Santander. This has been held less than one month after the conference organized by ASYRAS (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies), at the University of […]
Today I’ve received one of those blind peer reviewer reports which tells me how useless I am and how totally sub-standard my work is because… I mean, so many things that, really, I wonder that I’ve published anything at all. What the reviewers don’t know is that I no longer need to publish any more […]
I was interviewed a few days ago by the Colectivo Cala of Alburquerque (Badajoz, Extremadura) for their radio segment (available as a podcast) ‘Hombre tenías que ser’, in which they comment on diverse aspects of masculinity. I was asked to comment on ideal masculinity, men and cinema, a topic which I had not considered in […]
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) […]
The new book I present today, Exploring Reproduction and Gender in Contemporary Feminist Speculative Fiction: Mothers Out of this World, is a collective volume that I have co-edited with Jessica Aliaga-Lavrijsen, of the University of Zaragoza. This is the end of a long collaboration, initiated by Jessica herself, which has lasted about two years, perhaps […]
I don’t know if I’m suffering from writers’ block but it’s the first time since I started this blog back in 2010 that I feel I might be exhausting my topics. I’ve been trying to write something for the last four days, and I have finally decided to clear my schedule and force myself to […]
So, here we are in what might be seen retrospectively by historians as the beginning of World War III. All wars are stupid, but this one has been started out of such rampant stupidity that it’s really hard to believe. Neither the governments that clashed in WWI, nor Hitler, who provoked World War II, were […]
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 […]
In his famous, but rather absurd, essay “The Death of the Author” (1968), Roland Barthes ranted about the impending dismissal of authors from literary criticism, to be replaced by a sort of totally objective super-reader that would focus on the text as if sprung from language itself, with no active mediation from the author. The […]