Research Team

Dr. Miriam Fernández-Santiago, University of Granada

is a senior lecturer and Head of the English and German Department of the University of Granada, where she currently teaches literary theory, and the cultures and literatures of English-Speaking countries. She graduated in English in 1997 at the University of Huelva, where she started teaching in 1998 as she completed her M.A. on Thomas Pynchon. In 1999, she was granted a fellowship by the University of Cornell to participate in the Summer Courses of the School of Criticism and Theory and worked as Visiting Instructor at Duke University in 1999 and 2000. In 2001 she was granted a fellowship to carry out doctoral research at the Universities of Huelva and Seville and two years later, she completed her PhD on the role of humor in postmodernity from the perspective of critical theory. From 2004 to 2007, she taught several courses on writing and English/American Literatures at the Universities of Seville, Pablo de Olavide and Sweet Briar College. Since 2007, she teaches at the University of Granada. In 2004, Dr. Fernandez-Santiago joined Research Group “North American Studies” (HUM488) at the University of Seville, and became a member of the Editorial Board of Revista de EstudiosNorteamericanos of the Spanish Association of American Studies. At present, she is the secretary of both, the journal and the association.Since 2019, Dr. Fernández-Santiago is the main researcher of Research Group GRACO: “Studies in Literature, Criticism and Culture.” Her early research interests range from Cultural and Intercultural Studies, Critical Theory, and North American Literature, including volumes such as The (I)logics of Postmodern Humor (2003), The Voice and the Void (2005), Map of Good Intercultural Practices (2009), book chapters like “Warped Discourses: The Logic of Absence in Democratic Discourse” (2011), “EstudioComparativo del Uso del DobleLiterarioen las obras de Umberto Eco y E. A. Poe” (2011) and articles such as “Unreliable Homodiegesis and the Trace of Influence: the Work of E.A. Poe” (2010), “Revisiting Untraded Paths. Literary Revisions of Eighteenth-Century Exploration Journals” (2011), “Poe’s Play-Full Narratives. His Use of Dramatic Devices in Short Fiction.” (2011), «Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative Use of Literary Doubling» (2013), and “Divination and Comparison: The Dialogical Tension between Self-Reflective Aesthetics and Sensational Motifs in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin Series” (2016). She has also conducted extensive research on the teaching of English as a Foreign Language , with volumes such as Integración de Estrategias de Aprendizaje Cooperativo en el Aula Bilingüe (2015);Integración de Contenidos e Idiomas en Educación Superior (2010), Autonomous Reading Skills in Academic English (2010), and Guía para la Integración de las TIC en el Aula de Idiomas ( 2006); as well as manuals on the literatures and cultures of Spanish and English-speaking countries, like North American Poetry.A Student Guide (2021), Key Texts. Verse, Epics and Drama in English (2019), Literary Minorities in English. Student Guide (2019), LiteraturaInglesa I (2018), Cultures in English (2015), Uses and Varieties of the English Language(2014) and Spanish Civilization and Culture (2007). In 2016, she joined Dr. Francisco Collado-Rodríguez’s team for Research Project “Trauma, Culture and Posthumanity: The Definition of Being in Current North American Narrative” (FFI2015-63506P), which currently branches into Research Project “Contemporary North American Narrative and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Posthumanity, Privation and Social Change” (2020-2023: PID2019-106855GB-I00) led by Dr. Sonia Baelo-Allué and Dr. MónicaCalvoPascual; as well as Research Project “Interfaces: Representing Human Vulnerability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (P20_00008). Within the frame of these projects, she has published articles like “Of Language and Music. A Neo-Baroque, Environmental Approach to the Human, Infrahuman and Superhuman in Richard Powers’ Orfeo.” (2019), “Accountable Metaphors. Transhuman Poetics of Failure in Tao Lin’s Taipei.” (2021), “Agential Materialism and the Feminist Paradigm. A Posthumanist Approach”(2021) and “Post-postmodernist Aesthetics of Irrelevance: Textual Disability as Narrative Prosthesis (The Lin/Wallace Connection)” (Forthcoming 2022); and book chapters such as “ Memoria (in)mediática y trauma continuado. Identidad nacional bajo el prisma femenino en Al Límite, de T.R. Pynchon” (2019) , “Narrative Exhaustion And The Posthuman Narrative Self In Tao Lin’s Taipei.” (2019), “Where Else but Reading? Blending Genres in Jasper Fforde’s Nursery Crime Series” (2020), “Split. A Dystopian Vision of Transhuman Enhancement. Speciesist and Political Issues Intersecting Trauma and Disability”(2021). Other titles such as “Female Ageing and Technological Reproduction .Feminist Transhuman Embodiments in Jasper Fforde’s The Woman Who Died A Lot,” “Orfeo: A Posthuman Modern Prometheus. Uncommon Powers of Musical Imagination,” “Vulnerable: Intersecting Disability and Precarity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Case of Mr. Robot (2015-2019)” and “Pretty Dolls Don’t Play Dice: The Calculated Vulnerabilities of Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach”are expected before the end of 2021 or in 2022.

Dr. Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández, University of Córdoba

Dr. Susana Nicolás Román, University of Almeria

is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and German at the University of Córdoba (UCO), where she currently teaches cultural studies and intercultural communication both to undergraduate and postgraduate students. In 1999 she graduated in English Studies at the University of Córdoba, where she started teaching in 2000 as part of the requirements of a research fellowship that she was granted by the Regional Government of Andalusia to carry out her PhD thesis. During this period, she was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University in 2001 and 2002, where she conducted archival research at the Denise Levertov Papers. She completed her PhD on the role of perception in Denise Levertov’s poetry in 2005 and became a lecturer at the Department of English and German (UCO) where she has been working since then. Her main teaching interests both at undergraduate and postgraduate level diverge into two separate areas. On the one hand, cultural studies and literature written in English, with courses that range from Shakespeare, short story fiction, American Literature, or Postcolonial studies, among others. On the other, English for academic and professional purposes in its fruitful overlapping with Bilingualism and CLIL methodology. Apart from that, she has also taught extracurricular courses of English for Business and Economics students (2006 and 2007) and English for Veterinary Science students (2008). She has been an invited speaker to Master’s courses at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (2014), the University of Oviedo (2021) and the University of Granada (2021). She has delivered courses on English and CLIL to teaching staff at the University of Córdoba between 2006 and 2009, as well as to in-service Primary and Secondary education teachers (2018, 2021). From 2006 to 2011 she was responsible for the teaching innovation project devoted to the progressive implementation of bilingual experiences in the classrooms of the university of Córdoba, prior to the creation of the official bilingual project at the UCO. In addition to that, she has extensive experience in leading and contributing to university teaching projects. From 2000, Dr. Gámez-Fernández joined the Research Group “Research in English and Related Literature” (HUM682) until in 2019 she became a member of the research group “Studies in Literature, Criticism and Culture (GRACO)”(HUM676). Her research interests range from American poetry, Anglo-Indian literature, ecocriticism, cultural studies to postcolonial studies, with a focus on issues of perception, belonging and precarity. In 2009, she was awarded the Leocadio Martín Mingorance prize, granted by the University of Córdoba for her article on the religious poetry of Denise Levertov (2007) published at the journal Renascence: Essays on Literature, Ethics, Spirituality and Religion. Apart from her research periods at Stanford University, she has also been a Visiting Scholar at Wheaton College (USA) and Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). She was one of the Founders of AEEII (Spanish Association for India Studies) in 2007, also serving as Secretary-Treasurer from 2007-2009. She was also a founding member of the Challenging Precarity: A Global Network in 2018, to which she currently serves as Membership Secretary. Dr. Gámez-Fernández has organized and participated in numerous national, International Conferences. She became a member of the Editorial Board of Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos of the Spanish Association of American Studies in 2021. She was a member of the National Research Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Economy and Competitivity (MINECO) entitled ‘BESOC’ (Ref. No. EDU2017-84800R). She is currently a member of the European project entitled “Teachers, Culture, Pluri (TEACUP)”, reference number 2019-1-ES01-KA203-064412, as well as of the European project “Quality in Language Learning (QuILL)” reference number 2020-1-PT01-KA226-HE-094809. She is a member of the Research Project “Interfaces: Representing Human Vulnerability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (P20_00008) and leading Researcher together with Dr. Fernández-Santiago of the Research project “Representations of vulnerability as exclusion or social cohesion: precarity and disability in fiction discourses in English (20th and 21st century), reference number A-HUM-22-UGR20. Within the frame of these projects, she is co-editing two publishing projects with Routledge. She is also preparing two publishing projects with Peter Lang.

is Senior Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Almería where she currently teaches British and North-American contemporary literatures. She graduated in English in 2002 at the University of Almería. In 2003, she was granted a fellowship by Junta de Andalucía (FPI program) to carry out doctoral research. She started teaching in 2003 as she completed her M.A on Edward Bond. During this period, she was visiting PhD at the Universities of London, Cambridge and Montpellier. In 2008, she finished her PhD on the female characters of Edward Bond’s plays. She received the extraordinary award for her dissertation and best academic record at the Faculty of Humanities. Since 2003, she teaches at the University of Almeria. She was the Director of ODISEA from 2014 to 2016. At present, she is member of the Editorial Board of ODISEA, Journal of Business and Education and IGI Global Publishing. She is also an active member of the Challenging Precarity Global Network. Her research interests range from Contemporary British and North American Theatre, the role of women, violence and Sociocultural Studies, including volumes such as Estudios de Literatura Norteamericana: Nabokov y otros autores contemporáneos (2008), Revisiting Evil: Power, Purity and Desireabout the interpretation of female evils through film/stage and other literary forms (2017) and Women in Edward Bond (2018); book chapters like “‘She Sleeps inside like a Lion and a Lamb and a Child’: Revisiting Shakespeare’s Female Evil through Edward Bond’s Lear” (2017), “The Revolutionary Woman in Human Cannon” (2018), “Sexo y Transgresión en el Teatro ‘in-yer-face’: Sarah Kane y Mark Ravenhill” (2014) and articles such as “When Violence on Stage becomes Real: My Name is Rachel Corrie” (2011), “A Challenge for Educational Theatre: Directing Edward Bond’s The Children” (2010) and “The Trigger of Truth is in your hands: Conversations with Edward Bond” (2016). She has also developed research on drama as a resource for the innovative teaching of English as a Foreign Language with volumes such as Drama and CLIL (2015) and La Dramatización como Recurso Educativo a nivel Universitario (2020) and articles like “Promoting Reading Skills in CLIL” (2016), “NuevasTendencias en la Didáctica de las Lenguas Extranjeras aplicadas al Entorno Profesional: la Grabación Audiovisual con Enfoque Interdisciplinar” (2016), “Autonomous Learning and Self-Assessment through the European Language Portfolio: A Pilot Study on Primary Education” (2015), “Students’ Production of Podcasts as an Innovative Resource to promote Communicative Competence in English” (2015), “El Teatro como Recurso Didáctico en la Metodología CLIL: un Enfoque Competencial” (2011). She has extensively participated in international conferences since 2003. Actively involved in innovative methodologies, she has coordinated different groups and participated in the CEIA3 project “Fomento del Aprendizaje Autónomo en Lenguas Extranjeras a través del E-Pel y Materiales Audiovisuales” with the Universities of Huelva and Jaén (2012-2013). She is also the director of the English drama group “Waiting for Theatre” since 2015. In 2019, she received the DOCENTIA Excellence Award. At present, she is a member of the Research Project “Interfaces: Representing Human Vulnerability in the Fourth Industrial Revolution” (P20_00008).Within the frame of this project, titles such as “Vulnerability on Contemporary Stage: Transversing Gendered Precarity in Gary Owen’s Iphigenia in Splott (2015) and In The Pipeline (2010), “Trascending Vulnerability and Resilience: Bondian Female Youth in the Big Brum Plays” and “Precarity and Climate Change on Stage: Educating the Future Generation” are expected in 2022.

Dr. Carolina Sánchez Palencia, Universidad de Sevilla

is a Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Seville where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Literary Theory, Gender Studies and Contemporary Literatures in English. In 1990 and 1991 she was granted fellowships by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Edinburgh where she could develop her doctoral research on women’s popular narratives. In 1991 she was given a research grant by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Education to complete her M.A and PhD projects which were given extraordinary awards. At the University of Seville she has co-founded the Interdisciplinary Seminar on Women’s Studies (SIEMUS) and the Research Group “Discursos de la Postmodernidad” funded by Junta de Andalucía. At present she is member of “Escritoras y Escrituras” Research Group (Sevilla Territorio de Igualdad Award 2020). Apart from the present project, she has participated in the I+D research projects “Queer Peripheries: Representations, corporealities, geographies” (FFI2008-05615 2009-2012); “Queer Peripheries II: Spaces, Bodies, Material Culture” (FFI2011-24211 2011-2014) and “Queer Temporalities in Contemporary Anglophone Culture: Literature, Cinema, Videogames” (PGC2018-095393-B-I00 2019-2022).

Her research interests are focused on Gender Studies and Postcolonial Studies where she explores the concepts and representations of trauma, vulnerability, precariousness and resilience and the ways they are embodied by dissident and non-normative subjects and communities. She has published extensively on Modernist (V. Woolf, J. Rhys, V. Brittain, E. Bagnold, M. Borden) and postmodernist (J.Winterson, T. Wertenbaker, F.Weldon, E. Figes, S. Rushdie) authors and more recently she has written articles and chapters on Black British fiction (Jackie Kay, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo, Caryl Phillips, Kamila Shamsie) motivated by her concern in these authors’ challenge of the hegemonic grand-narratives of post-imperial Britain. Her 2011 volume Literaturas Postcoloniales en el Mundo Global positively reviewed in Atlantis (Q1) already addressed most of these challenges. Her work has been published in high impact journals like Journal of Postcolonial Writing, European Journal of Women’s Studies, CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture, Atlantis, Miscelanea or International Journal of English Studies.

She has supervised three PhD theses “Una lectura crítica de la obra de Jeanette Winterson” (Verónica Pacheco 2004); “Haunting the Stage: The Performance of Trauma by Contemporary Female Playwrights” (Eva Gil 2014); “Mujeres Airadas: La dramaturgia de John Osborne desde la perspectiva de género” and is presently supervising three other theses that will be completed between 2022 and 2023: "Being(s) in Transit: A Study of Contemporary Nigerianness from a Gendered Literary Perspective" (Ariadna Serón); “American barrios, Latina ways, African roots: Feminidades precarizadas en la literatura afrodescendiente” (Macarena Martín); “Go Forth to Kill and Be Killed": British Female Pacifism in World War I” (Jaime Jiménez)

is currently working as a lecturer in the English, French and German Department at the University of Málaga, where she teaches English and linguistics. She graduated in English in 2003 at the University of Málaga. She holds an M.A. in American Literature from the University of Sheffield in 2008. She received a “Cum Laude” for her PhD on David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest andneuroscienceat the University of Seville in 2016. She taught Critical Theory at the University of Seville in 2017 andsince 2012 she has been teaching courses on literature and linguistics at the University of Málaga. In 2010 She joined the Research Group HUM-399 “Discursos de la Postmodernidad” at the University of Seville up to the year 2021 when she joined her current Research Group GRACO: “Studies in Literature, Criticism and Culture.” She is currently the editorial assistant and book reviewer for ESSE Messenger. Dr Chapman has published three articles on Infinite Jest; “Piecing Together: Body Control, Mutability and Entertainment Technology in Infinite Jest” (2019), “Jaded Selves and Body Distance: A Case Study of Cotard’s Syndrome in Infinite Jest.”(2020) and“Bodies in Infinite Jest” (2021). Her main research interests are the depictions of body and mind in contemporary English literature, neuroscience in literature (in particular cognitive sciences), and the effects of the media and technology on society, 4th Industrial Revolution, subjectivity and vulnerability theories. She is co-author for the forthcoming article “Narrative Prosthesis (The Lin/Wallace Connection)”.

Dr. Ana Chapman, Universidad de Málaga

Prof. Francisco Collado Rodríguez, University of Zaragoza

is Professor of English (American Literature) at the Department of English and German Studies of the University of Zaragoza. He teaches courses on 20th- and 21st- century American literature and on popular culture. He graduated with honors in English at the University of Extremadura, subsequently carrying on his doctoral studies at Extremadura and Edinburgh.

He was president of the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS) from March 2007 to March 2011. He has been editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies from 1986 to 1990, and since then he is associate editor/reviewer of a number of academic journals.

He has written on the influence of fantasy, myth, and scientific discourse on modernist and postmodernist English and American fiction, as well as on ethics, trauma and literature. He has published essays on novelists Richard Adams, Thomas Pynchon, Bharati Mukherjee, Kurt Vonnegut, E. L. Doctorow, Bobbie Ann Mason, Eric Kraft, Chuck Palahniuk, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, as well as on poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He has also written books on Richard Adams’s fiction (The Frontiers of Mythmaking: Richard Adams’s Early Fiction, 1994) and Thomas Pynchon (El orden del caos: literatura, política y posthumanidad en la narrativa de Thomas Pynchon, 2004, awarded a National Research Prize by the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies). In 2007 he co-edited with Nieves Pascual and Laura Alonso the volume Masculinities, Femininities and the Power of the Hybrid in U.S. Narratives: Essays on Gender Borders. He also co-edited a special issue of Pynchon Notes, with Celia Wallhead in 2008.

Among his publications are «Minimalism, Post-humanism and the Recovery of History in Bobbie Ann Mason´s Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail,» in The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 39.1 (2006); “Ethics in the Second Degree: Trauma and Dual Narratives in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated,” in Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32.1 (2008): 54-68. “From Science to Terrorism: the Transgressing Function of Energy in Pynchon’s Against the Day” in Against the Grain. Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives. Pohlman, Sascha, ed. Dialogue 8. (Rodopi. 2010): 323–47. “Trauma and Storytelling in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men and The Road,” in Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 48.1 (2012): 45–69. “Textual Unreliability, Trauma and the Fantastic in Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby,” in Studies in the Novel (University of North Texas), vol. 45.4 (Winter 2013): 620–37. “Meaning Deferral, Jungian Symbolism, and the Quest for V. in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of 49,” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 56.3 (2015): 255–69, and «Intratextuality, Trauma, and the Posthuman in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge», in Critique 57.3 (2016). In 2013 he edited the volume Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, Choke. (Bloomsbury Studies in Contemporary North American Fiction) (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

Dr. Sonia Baelo Allué, University of Zaragoza

is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza (Spain) where she currently teaches U.S. Literature and British and American Culture. Her research centres on contemporary U.S. fiction, trauma studies, 9/11 fiction, digital fiction and posthumanism.

Her more recent publications include the journal articles “Transhumanism, Transmedia and the Serial Podcast: Redefining Storytelling in Times of Enhancement” (in International Journal of English Studies, 19.1. 2019) and “Exhaustion and Regeneration in 9/11 Speculative Fiction: Kris Saknussemm’s ‘Beyond The Flags’” (in Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, 22. 2018).

She has just edited with Mónica Calvo-Pascual Posthumanism and Transhumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative (Routledge, 2021). She has also published the book Bret Easton Ellis’s Controversial Fiction: Writing between High and Low Culture (Bloomsbury, 2011) and co-edited with Dolores Herrero two books on the representation of trauma in literature: The Splintered Glass: Facets of Trauma in the Post-Colony and Beyond (Rodopi, 2011) and Between the Urge to Know and the Need to Deny: Trauma and Ethics in Contemporary British and American Literature (C. Winter, 2011). From 2013 until 2017 She was the editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies (Literature, Film and Cultural Studies volumes).

Dr. Mónica Carolina Calvo Pascual, University of Zaragoza

is a tenured lecturer at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza, where she graduated with honors in English, receiving an academic award. She subsequently obtained a competitive scholarship to carry on her doctoral studies at the University of Zaragoza, where she completed her PhD thesis on Stephen Marlowe’s historical fiction. Her current teaching at the Faculty of Letters includes twentieth-century U.S. literature and British history and culture.

Her current research focuses on critical posthumanism and the Anthropocene in twenty-first century U.S. and transnational-American literature. She is author of Chaos and Madness: The Politics of Fiction in Stephen Marlowe’s Historical Narratives, Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi (2011). Together with Dr. Marita Nadal, she has edited the volume Trauma in Contemporary Literature: Narrative and Representation (Routledge, 2014); and, with Dr. Sonia Baelo-Allué, Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative (Routledge, 2021).

Prof. Janet Wilson, Northampton University and Chair of the Challenging Precarity Network

Professor Wilson leads on Research in English and Creative Writing, Faculty of Education and Humanities, at the University of Northampton, where she is also Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies. She has a DPhil from Oxford (St Catherine’s College); an MA in Medieval English from the University of Sydney, Australia; and an MA in English from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. From 1988-1998 she taught at the University of Otago, New Zealand. She was Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford (2008-09) and Associate Fellow (until 2011); Visiting Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London (2010-11), and Vice-Chair of the New Zealand Studies Network 2010-14. She is currently (February 2019) Adjunct Visiting Professor at Auro University, Surat, India. She is vice-president of the National Conference of University Professors and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts

Janet Wilson's research interests are in the literary and visual cultures of the white settler societies of New Zealand and Australia, and diaspora and postcolonial writing more generally. She has published on New Zealand diaspora writers such as Janet Frame, Fleur Adcock, Katherine Mansfield, and Dan Davin, and on other topics such as literature and fundamentalism, slum and refugee narratives, Asian-Australian writing, New Zealand and Pacific/Oceania writing and globalisation, British Asian writing and cinema, liminality and transnationalism.

She has supervised doctoral dissertations in postcolonial, diaspora and global cultures as well as critical discourse analysis, nation, narration and representation, modernist writing, sociolinguistics and EFL. Topics include Place and Space in Postcolonial Cinema, Catalan and Spanish cinemas, the discourse of Chinese advertising, Modernism and Mysticism, Katherine Mansfield: Identity, Self and Consciousness; Beckett and Emptiness, contemporary Egyptian literature, representations of Mothering in South Asian film and narrative, Arabic translations into English, the Irish diaspora in Northampton, slum upgrades in Nigeria, Critical Discourse Analysis and news reporting. She welcomes applications for doctoral research in all these areas, especially those relevant to research interests in Katherine Mansfield and modernism, postcolonial and diaspora writing, poverty and precarity.