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 […]
It’s not at all usual for me to abandon an article at the writing stage, but today I’m giving myself permission. I’m sharing this misadventure in case you’ve also fallen down a rabbit hole and can’t climb out. Forgive me in advance for the long tale, I’m sort of exorcising this unfinished article from my […]
So that you know, according to the current regulations of my university, and following Catalan legislation, a full-time teacher (24 ECTS) is supposed to devote 640 yearly hours to teaching, out of the 1640 we’re supposed to work annually. Actually, if I multiply the 215 working days of the current academic year 2025-26 by 7,5 […]
I’ve been busy these past weeks finishing the edition of a new e-book with 96 book reviews written by my undergrad students in the subject Contemporary English Literature, whose publication I’m very proud to announce: Reviewing Contemporary Anglophone Fiction and Nonfiction, vol. II. You can check here the post I wrote last year about producing […]
I’m writing today out of stubbornness, because if I let a third blank week go by I fear that I might give up entirely this blog. I’m procrastinating my proper academic writing (an article and a book chapter have been waiting for too long), and I worry that if I also delay writing yet another […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Back in 1992, when I started writing the shorter dissertation in our doctoral programme (the equivalent of an MA dissertation, since we didn’t have yet MA programmes in Spain), I truly thought that my main field of research would be Adaptation Studies. My short dissertation dealt with the film adaptation of the novel by John […]
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 […]