THE GENERATIONAL DIVIDE IN ENGLISH STUDIES (IN SPAIN)

A week ago, as soon as I returned from the national conference of English Studies, I sent a joint email to five young scholars who had discussed SF in their presentations. I presented myself as the Spanish representative of the Science Fiction Research Association and the author of a recent book on masculinity and SF. […]

THIRTY YEARS OF CULTURAL STUDIES IN SPAIN: SUCCESS AND FAILURE

I have just come back from Vitoria-Gasteiz, where the colleagues of the English Department at the University of the Basque Country have organized the 48th AEDEAN conference, a yearly meeting which gathers together many Spanish specialists in English Studies. David Walton, a recently retired teacher at the Universidad de Murcia, and a dear colleague, proposed […]

CRAVING FOR CREATIVITY IN LITERARY RESEARCH (AFTER A SEMINAR)

A week ago, the research group I currently belong to, Beyond Postmemory, held the seminar “Nature Remembers: War, Trauma and Environmental Postmemory,” in which we discussed how not only human beings but also nature can suffer, so to speak, from PTSD and show signs of trauma long after a conflict. Postmemory, a concept coined by […]

ACADEMIC AUTHORS ARE WRITERS, ARENT’T WE?

Today I’m inspired by an article published by Mariana Valverde (Professor Emeritus, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto) in The Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly (76.RS, 2025: 1-8, https://doi.org/10.53386/nilq.v76iRS.1195). The article is called “How the Academy Negatively Affects Writing Practice” and is part of an issue devoted entirely to writing (https://nilq.qub.ac.uk/index.php/nilq/issue/view/134). No, I’m […]

WHY WE NEED TO BE WARY ABOUT INTRODUCING AI INTO OUR TEACHING AND RESEARCH: COMMENTING ON GUEST ET AL.

Today I’m using my post as an excuse to read an article titled “Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia” by Olivia Guest and 18 other authors based mostly in the Netherlands. This text can be found in a pre-print repository (https://philarchive.org/rec/GUEATU) where it was filed on 7 September of the current year. […]

VISION AND SUPPORT: WHAT PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS CAN DO TO SUPPORT ACADEMIC FREEDOM

This is a report of the ‘Vision and Support Session’, an open discussion held last week, on 30 July, within the Science Fiction Research Association conference, “Trans People are (in) the Future: Queer and Trans Futurity in Science Fiction” (University of Rochester, New York), a conference which lasted until yesterday, August 3rd. The organizer of […]

A MUCH DEEPER DAMAGE: LOSING ACADEMIC LIFE TO AI

I was supposed to take part in a seminar next week, which I’ll have to miss, with a talk about how to use AI correctly. In this talk I was going to describe, once more, how the late Iain M. Banks presents AI in his Culture novels (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series).             The Culture is a post-scarcity, […]

WHAT LIES BEHIND LITERARY THEORY: NOTES ON THE DISCUSSION OF CHARACTER

I’m beginning to read (and in some cases re-read) the bibliography for my future book on secondary characters. I wish I could jump straight into the matter that interests me, for which there is relatively scant bibliography, but I need for my theoretical framework in the introduction an overview of the secondary sources discussing the […]