DOING FILM STUDIES WITHIN ENGLISH STUDIES: YES, WE SHOULD

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of helping to consolidate the academic career of a brilliant young scholar, Pablo Gómez Muñoz, whose excellent volume Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (Routledge, 2023), I earnestly recommend. Pablo, who has been working for some years now at the Universidad […]

THE VANISHING TEXT: HOW TEXTUAL ANALYSIS IS DYING

Last week I wrote about the sheer amount of bibliography we are using in academic work. I neglected, however, to mention that in textual analysis primary sources are occupying less and less space. In the presentation of my volume La verdad sin fin: Expediente X back in September, Iván Gómez praised me for having the […]

The Posthuman Patriarchal Villain as Absolute Future Threat: Winston Duarte (and the hero James Holden) in The Expanse novel series

SPOILERS WARNING: This post deals with the nine Expanse novels and discusses the series’ ending. The Expanse is a series of nine space opera novels—Leviathan Wakes (2011), Caliban’s War (2012), Abaddon’s Gate (2013), Cibola Burn (2014), Nemesis Games (2015), Babylon’s Ashes (2016), Persepolis Rising (2017), Tiamat’s Wrath (2019) and Leviathan Falls (2021)—accompanied by a short […]

AN HOMAGE TO MINISERIES

It’s evening, after dinner, time to relax and choose a film to watch from whatever platform you subscribe. This means employing about two hours on consuming a story, leaving aside the fifteen minutes (or more) it may take to select a minimally enticing movie, unless you have preselected and placed some on your list. If […]

HISTORY HAPPENING: SUMMER, KABUL AND KATHARINE

The structure of the academic year makes summer the strangest of seasons, with a first month in which one is too exhausted to properly think just when a little bit of time for writing nonstop materializes, a second month when one is supposed to forget about all matters academic but cannot really do that, and […]

AFTER WATCHING THE CROWN: WONDERING WHY I CARE…

Needing entertainment I chose to spend close to 40 hours watching the four seasons of Netflix’s The Crown (2016-). It has been impossible these last few weeks to ignore the abundant articles and blog posts on the alleged misrepresentation of the British Royal Family in the new fourth season, released in mid-November, as I just […]

RETROSPECTIVE FEMINISM: THE QUEEN’S GAMBIT AND THE WOMAN CHESS PLAYER THAT NEVER WAS

Like half the planet, I’ve been watching these days Netflix’s mini-series The Queen’s Gambit (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10048342) and enjoying it very much despite my total lack of interest in chess. Written and directed by Scott Frank, the mini-series adapts a 1983 novel by Walter Tevis, a truly interesting American author. Some of his titles may ring a […]