In my last post I cited the doctoral dissertation by Leonardo Sánchez Ferrer, currently of the Universidad de Burgos, Políticas de reforma universitaria en España: 1983-1993 (1996). I downloaded it to take a quick look, and ended up devouring it, given its informative, reader-friendly tone. PhD dissertations are not a genre I tend to read […]
The Department I work for, the English and German Department of UAB, is very confused about its own history, meaning that we don’t really know where we come from. We have not bothered so far to keep track of our main events and their chronological progression, and I don’t know whether we’re typical or atypical […]
In my Department’s recent meeting about the last batch of BA (or, as we call them, TFG) dissertations we have assessed, we already considered the possibility of suppressing them in the near future. This is not for us to decide, but we work on the assumption that, sooner or later, our school or UAB, if […]
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 […]