A DEPARTMENT OUTING AND A BIT OF HISTORY: TO PARADISE

When the new Head of Department was appointed back in February 2023, we also appointed informally a ‘party planning committee’, constituted by two of my colleagues and myself. Perhaps you are part of that kind of Department in which people meet regularly for coffee breaks and lunch, and after hours for drinks, meals, or partying, […]

 ON OPEN ACCESS: INTO THE LABYRINTH

I’ll begin today by citing the post “Types of Open Access Publishing and the Benefits of Each” by Denise Mager from the blog Researcher.Life (16 August 2022), where I have found information on, precisely, the different types of open access publishing. Ready? (I’m shortening a bit the text):             Are you puzzled? Me too… Let’s […]

DOING FILM STUDIES WITHIN ENGLISH STUDIES: YES, WE SHOULD

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of helping to consolidate the academic career of a brilliant young scholar, Pablo Gómez Muñoz, whose excellent volume Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (Routledge, 2023), I earnestly recommend. Pablo, who has been working for some years now at the Universidad […]

ON LITERARY JOURNALISM, WHICH IS WHAT I WANT TO TEACH

I’m returning again after a couple of previous posts (see here the more recent one and here the older one) to the matter of nonfiction, which occupies me because I’m planning to teach an elective subject if not next year, then the following. As I explained in my previous posts, I find the label nonfiction […]

THE VANISHING TEXT: HOW TEXTUAL ANALYSIS IS DYING

Last week I wrote about the sheer amount of bibliography we are using in academic work. I neglected, however, to mention that in textual analysis primary sources are occupying less and less space. In the presentation of my volume La verdad sin fin: Expediente X back in September, Iván Gómez praised me for having the […]

HOW MUCH BIBLIOGRAPHY IS TOO MUCH?: ON ACADEMIC WRITING TODAY

In the most recent peer reviewing I have passed one of the reviewers complained that I quote too much and should paraphrase more. The article is 8880 words long and has 30 secondary sources, so on average 1 source for about 300 words, apart from the quotations from the primary source (I quoted from it […]

THE DNF BOOKS: PILING UP

I have been keeping a list of all the books I read since I was 14, in part as a way to check that I am reading every year as much as I think I should. I learned from an article I found last Summer in El País that I am a ‘super-reader’, that is […]

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE JOB MARKET: CONFLICTING REALITIES

I take my inspiration for this post from an article by Belén de Marcos for 20 Minutos, of 31st December: “La crisis ‘postcarrera,’ una realidad que sufren muchos jóvenes” (“The ‘post-degree’ crisis, a reality many young persons suffer”). The article has a curious subtitle, a quote from one of the persons interviewed: “Te hacen creer […]

 TRAINS AND OMNIBUSES: ON THE MEANS OF TRANSPORT IN FICTION

As readers and spectators, we tend to think of the means of transport as background elements of moderate importance. Yet, the moment I do some digging, what emerges is a rather complex picture of their relevance in the stories we tell and consume.             I am thinking of this matter today because of two lectures. […]