I’m teaching this semester the core subject ‘Contemporary Anglophone Literature: 1990 to the Present’, which we introduced last year in the fourth year of our English Studies BA. I was presenting the introduction to the first unit, 1990-1997, with a survey of the main political, social, and technoscientific events, when I noticed that most persons […]
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. […]
Duncan Yellowlees, PhD, (@dyellowlees.bsky.social), who presents himself as a researcher trainer, posted the following on BlueSky: “Practical tips for maintaining an engaged audience that sooo many academics fail at: – vary what they are listening to/focusing on – make sure data is connected to context – talk to them not at them – give the […]
Today I’m reading an article by, I quote, “Mary Curnock Cook CBE, who chairs the Dyson Institute and is a Trustee at HEPI, and Bess Brennan, Chief of University Partnerships with Cadmus, which is running a series of collaborative events with UK university leaders about the challenges and opportunities of generative AI in higher education.” […]
2025 is turning out to be one of the worst years in my life as a reader, for two reasons. One is that I find it harder and harder to find novels that interest me, of any type. The other is that since Trump’s election, I’m spending at least two hours a day reading the […]
Five years ago today, on 13 March 2025, Spanish PM Pedro Sánchez declared the state of emergency, in view of the alarming expansion of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus causing Covid-19. Today, many other persons and media are considering the impact of the pandemic on our lives and, in particular, on education. I don’t have anything to […]
I was told yesterday that I must bear in mind that not all of our students agree with the left-wing political position I defend, as a feminist and a socialist, and that some actually support right-wing policies. This is hardly surprising if we take into account voting statistics and the growth of the extreme right […]
The experiment I am running in the fourth-year core subject Contemporary Fiction in English is progressing well, but there are some snags that I’d like to address here. Here we go, then. We have now finished Unit 1 (1990-1997) and have started Unit 2 (1998-2006) and even though most students have finished reading the […]
I have shared in class with my students the article by Gaby Hinsliff’s “I Fear Books Are Going the Way of Vinyl Records – A Rarefied Pursuit for Hobbyists” published in The Guardian a couple of months ago. This article begins as the typical piece on summer reading to take then a turn towards the […]
When we started working on the new 2021 syllabus, my Literature colleagues and I came to the conclusion that our students have too little contact with the contemporary world. Our undergrads take in the first year an Introduction to English Literature, which basically covers the British and Irish 20th century, beginning with James Joyce’s “The […]