SONGS OF SURVIVAL: MEN IN 21ST CENTURY POPULAR MUSIC

Today I am celebrating the publication of the eleventh book I have edited gathering together work by my BA and MA students. I refer to Songs of Survival: Men in 21st Century Popular Music, written by the MA students enrolled in this year’s elective subject ‘Gender Studies’. Two years ago I decided to plan companion […]

The Posthuman Patriarchal Villain as Absolute Future Threat: Winston Duarte (and the hero James Holden) in The Expanse novel series

SPOILERS WARNING: This post deals with the nine Expanse novels and discusses the series’ ending. The Expanse is a series of nine space opera novels—Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), Abaddon’s Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon’s Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) and Leviathan Falls (2021)—accompanied by a short […]

AGEING MEN IN ACTION CINEMA: A DYING BREED WITH NO REPLACEMENT

My post today is inspired by Daniel Soufi’s article for El País “Salvar el mundo por no jubilarse: los héroes de más de 60 años llenan las pantallas de cine” [Saving the World to Avoid Retirement: Over-60 Heroes Fill the Cinema Screens]. Soufi wonders why ageing male actors are still playing action heroes and names […]

READING A LONG NOVEL SERIES (FOR ACADEMIC PURPOSES): THE EXPANSE

I’m returning to James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse, which I discussed two posts ago, this time to reflect on the strategies required to face such a long read for academic purposes.             Whereas mainstream and literary novels are usually published as stand-alone volumes, series abound in genre fiction. They are sometimes bound by the presence […]

Experiencing Music: Lost Habits

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 […]

A PHANTOM GENRE: THE STRANGE CASE OF THE TECHNOTHRILLER

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 […]

ASSHOLES, VILLAINS, AND THE CURRENT WAR IN UKRAINE

One of experts interviewed in the collective volume edited by psychologist Jean-François Marmion, The Psychology of Stupidity (2020; originally Psychologie de la Connerie, 2018; trans. Liesl Schillinger), to which I devoted my post of 4 March, was moral philosopher Aaron James. Having now read his splendid monograph Assholes: A Theory (2012), I would like to […]