I’ve had the honour of being a guest speaker at the seventh doctoral seminar that AEDEAN (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-norteamericanos) has organized at the Universidad de Cantabria, in Santander. This has been held less than one month after the conference organized by ASYRAS (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies), at the University of […]
An article by Tyler Jagt, published on 1 June 2026, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “My Students Can’t Read” has been creating a bit of a stir this past week and I’d like to comment on its gist. Jagt claims that his BA students’ inability to read a 20-page article (he teaches Rhetoric) […]
Somewhat rashly, I told my last-year BA students that if any was interested in an academic career they were welcome to discuss their future plans with me. The first email message I have received indicates that they are not necessarily familiar with the concept ‘academic career’, so this post is intended as a beginners’ introduction […]
I’m three classes away from finishing (on 28 May) my third/fourth year BA elective subject ‘English Prose: 21st Century Autobiographies and Memoirs’ and I’ve been drafting my conclusions. I have decided to share them here, together with a couple of lists. Each class (80-90 minutes) has consisted of the following: a mini-lecture (35 minutes) […]
My post refers today to L’absentisme a les aules universitàries de la UAB: per què val la pena anar a classe [Absenteeism in UAB’s university classrooms: why attending classes is worthwhile], a report coordinated by José Luis Muñoz Moreno and Edelmira Badillo Jiménez, and authored by Patricia Olmos Rueda and Dolors Márquez Cebrián. You can […]
Today’s post is partly inspired by Ana Bravo-Moreno and Francisco Javier Ogáyar-Marín edited collection Los males de la academia: Abuso de poder, endogamia, acoso, corrupción y otras violencias (Peter Lang, 2026), which can be downloaded for free here. This is a necessary book to animate a conversation carried so far discreetly away from public attention, […]
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 wrote a while ago a post titled “Students’ Ratings of Faculty: How It Works and Some Ideas to Improve It (sic),” criticizing how the survey to rate our task as teachers is organized. Since then I’ve been pestering the Dean of my school to do something about this matter. Other teachers must have been […]
As I have mentioned I’ll be soon teaching an elective subject on autobiographies and memoirs (in English). In preparation, I’ve been putting together a list of 100 remarkable pre-21st century texts in those genres, apart from the list of 21st century books my students need to read (each student chooses four from this list). This […]
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 […]