{"id":4554,"date":"2026-07-05T16:05:25","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T16:05:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=4554"},"modified":"2026-07-05T16:06:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T16:06:45","slug":"after-a-seminar-some-reflections-on-doctoral-dissertations-in-english-literature-and-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2026\/07\/05\/after-a-seminar-some-reflections-on-doctoral-dissertations-in-english-literature-and-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"\u00a0AFTER A SEMINAR: SOME REFLECTIONS ON DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS (IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AND CULTURE)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve had the honour of being a guest speaker at the seventh doctoral seminar that AEDEAN<\/a> (Asociaci\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola 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<\/a> (Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies), at the University of Alicante. It\u2019s certainly an advantage for our doctoral students here in Spain to have the chance to network through two different but perfectly compatible associations and events, and also to present their work in public. It\u2019s very good training for the viva.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The three-day AEDEAN seminar consists of two plenary sessions (one for Literature\/Culture and one for Language\/Linguistics), and a series of panels in which students present their dissertations in just ten minutes. They receive then feedback from the audience and from the two conveners, who were this time AEDEAN\u2019s President Rosario Arias, and Gerardo Rodr\u00edguez-Salas from the University of Granada. Feeling I was there to do more than deliver a guest lecture, and avoiding the temptation of roaming all over lovely Santander, I participated in the panels as an informal third convener.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Typically, the 35 attendees were divided into separate panels for Literature\/Culture and Language\/Linguistics, which makes sense, but somehow contributes to perpetuating the growing distance between the two areas. At least, we were all together for the Q&A session, Juan Antonio Cutillas\u2019s fine plenary lecture on upper-class accents in British screen fiction (focused on The Crown<\/em>) and my own lecture, on the importance of publishing books. We were also together for the in memoriam session commemorating Javier Ruano Garc\u00eda, of the Universidad de Salamanca, who sadly passed away unexpectedly a few weeks ago. Javier\u2019s many merits are difficult to sum up, but, among others, he was a key figure in the AEDEAN board and ASYRAS\u2019s founder. The seminar also included a public reading at Santander\u2019s beautiful Librer\u00eda Gil to present Gerardo Rodr\u00edguez-Salas\u2019s new poetry volume Oxford Circus<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I\u2019m not offering here a formal report of the seminar but an overview, based on my personal impressions about the presentations. I attended eighteen in total by students mainly at the early stages of their dissertations, with just a few near the end of the process, all in the area of Literature and Culture. I won\u2019t be naming any names, except for Marcelo Fornari L\u00f3pez (Universitat de Barcelona), whose dissertation Interstitial Selves: Autotheory in Contemporary US Literature<\/em>, soon to be submitted, sounded simply fascinating. Other dissertations were also very interesting, but not as complete (yet), which is why I won\u2019t mention them. Instead, I\u2019d like to raise some issues. They are all interconnected and it\u2019s hard to begin specifically with one, but it must be done, so, here we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I\u2019ll begin with the supervisors. Rosario Arias reminded the students that they had to name their supervisors in their presentations, as most didn\u2019t mention them, but this is not what concerns me. In an ideal situation, when a student mentions a topic for a possible PhD dissertation to a teacher in the Department where said student has taken a BA or MA degree, the honest thing to do is to put them in touch with a specialist, in whatever university this person might work. If, to give an example, a student asks me to supervise a dissertation on neo-Victorian fiction, I should put this person in contact with Rosario Arias, who happens to be the main specialist in the area. The student should, then, register at the Universidad de M\u00e1laga, where she works, and present their dissertation there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          Instead, we tend to accept supervisions even when the projected dissertation is not really in our area, because it\u2019s convenient for either our CV or our Department\u2019s doctoral programme. It might well be that the student won\u2019t or can\u2019t register in another university, for lack of funding since, as we know, grants are very scarce. We tend to stay local. Yet, if a non-specialist supervisor ends up selecting for the viva board members who are not specialists, either, we end up passing doctoral dissertations that a true specialist would not validate. In this way, we lower the standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          I was truly astonished by the self-assurance with which most PhD students handle sophisticated theorization, and I\u2019ve been wondering what kind of training they have received at MA level, since many were first-year students. Either that, or other supervisors have methods I don\u2019t know to train beginners efficiently in the complexities of theorization. Now, the problem with this approach is that the PhD students I heard didn\u2019t seem to have a similarly strong grasp of the primary sources they must explore. It seems to me that PhD students know much more about theory than about English Literature itself, and that the theory they are familiar with is not necessarily literary theory but a variety of theorizations from Philosophy, Sociology, Psychology, Environmentalism, and even science (in Medical Humanities).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          This result of this spotty knowledge of literature is a series of problems connected with the corpus: a) an insistence on studying ultra-canonical old and newer names, while many past and present authors are neglected; b) theses that study a very limited corpus, from one to three texts, because, with all the theory this is sufficient to fill in 300 pages, regardless of whether the scant number of texts is sufficient to make a solid point; c) theoretical frameworks so specific that there are actually very few primary sources corresponding to them. The dissertations with the more substantial corpus presented another singular problem: in those cases the list of novels, for it\u2019s always novels, was too heterogeneous in terms of place and period to cohere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          There\u2019s another matter I\u2019ve also come across today in a brilliant MA dissertation that I must soon judge as a board member: the approach is impeccably professional but not necessarily passionate. I don\u2019t doubt that all doctoral students I saw at the seminar are in love with their topics, but a certain something I can\u2019t even begin to define was often missing. I\u2019m here wildly speculating, but it might have to do with the supervisor\u2019s excessive intervention; or, alternatively, the student\u2019s excessive dependence on the supervisor. Perhaps, even, difficulties to grasp what a dissertation entails for lack of familiarity with any of the finished products (meaning that many doctoral students have not read any theses and it\u2019s not clear to them what they are). It could also be just a matter of still imperfect communication skills. The older students sounded much more passionate, the younger more detached, as if playing the role expected from them, rather than performing in a more personal way. Perhaps, and that\u2019s something to consider, they were just nervous, even though all the sessions were relaxed and friendly (at least, that was the intention).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          As a mentoring convener, I gave feedback practically to everyone, a task facilitated by the fact that most dissertations dealt with contemporary fiction, with a few focused on the 19th<\/sup> century, a territory I\u2019m also familiar with. Perhaps this is something to comment on, too. In my Department, as I see from the yearly doctoral workshops, we also train PhD students in the period between the Middle Ages and the late 18th<\/sup> century, and I assume this is the case in many other Departments. Yet, to judge from the projects present at Santander, most PhD students prefer contemporary texts. I was happy to see areas such as speculative fiction (SF, dystopia, horror), animated children\u2019s films, digital life writing, and so on represented, but I wonder what the whole map of current research in English Studies in Spain looks like. There are hundreds of dissertations being written in the two main areas of Literature\/Culture and Language\/Linguistics and, perhaps, what I\u2019ve seen in Santander is not as representative as it might seem of our area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

          The last issue I want to raise is our difficulties to establish genealogies of knowledge, though I\u2019m possibly misusing the term. This issue connects, too, with the difficulties of choosing the most adequate tutors. Let me explain what I mean. At this point, in 2026, a good number of Spanish scholars in English Studies have solid careers with many international publications. Yet, all the students presented theoretical frameworks in which none of us was mentioned. It might be our fault for always suggesting that they seek referents abroad, which totally undermines what we do as scholars. We\u2019ve taught PhD students to avoid presenting themselves as our disciples, as if this was too provincial or amateur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019re also neglectful of our achievements. In one case, a student presented a project very similar to a dissertation by a person I know, already a tenured teacher. This dissertation was mentioned in the bibliography, but not as a major referent. When I asked the student about this matter, she told me that the dissertation is not even online, much less published as a book, which is what I told the author she should do a few years ago, when she passed her examination for tenure (I was on the board). This omission or neglect means that the student presenting her PhD in the seminar ran the risk of replicating work that her predecessor had already done. This should never happen. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My impression, to sum up, was very good. I wasn\u2019t expected to attend all the panels, but the fact is that I did, and which much pleasure. It was wonderful to see so many talented young persons, and I hope with all my heart not only that they eventually submit their dissertations and get cum laude, but also that the Spanish university makes room for them. As an English Studies specialist, I\u2019m proud of the enormous collective effort we have made in Spain, particularly in the last three decades, to pull ourselves by our bootstraps and to become much better tutors of our young PhD students than ours were. They are the future of the area and our true, most brilliant legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve had the honour of being a guest speaker at the seventh doctoral seminar that AEDEAN (Asociaci\u00f3n Espa\u00f1ola 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1093,22,26,27,1053,34,1052],"tags":[183,184,1504,1505],"class_list":["post-4554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-studies","category-literary-studies","category-post-graduate","category-research","category-students","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","category-university","tag-english-literature","tag-english-studies","tag-phd-dissertations","tag-thesis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4555,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4554\/revisions\/4555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}