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The Team
Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico — Principal Investigator
Dr. Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico is Professor of North American Literature and was Vice-Provost for International Affairs at the Complutense University from 2015 to 2019. She was President of SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies) until 2019 and Chair of the Department of English Philology II (2013-2015). She has been an elected member of the General Council of ASA (American Studies Association 2008-2011) and is currently a member of the International Committee of that association.
Her research and publication record on gender studies, literature, autobiography and ethnicity include the edition of an eight-volume Gender Studies collection (the last one being the bilingual Estudios De Género: Visiones Transatlánticas / Gender Studies: Transatlantic Visions, 2016), and the book A Critical Gaze from the Old World: Transatlantic Perspectives on American Studies (London: Peter Lang, 2018), in addition to more than seventy articles and book chapters. Her most recent publications include: “Del feminismo y sus versiones en el ámbito angloamericano” (Tropelías, Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada. Núm. 36, 2021: 69-85); “What Is the ‘Transnational Turn’ in American Literary Studies? A Critical Overview.” (Atlantis. Vol. 42.2, December 2020: 138-159);"Transnationalism, Autobiography and Criticism: the Spaces of Women's Imagination" (The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. Routledge, 2019: 202-2013); "Between Molds and Models: Female identities in Almudena Grandes and Roberta Fernández" (Symbolism 17, 2017: 143-167) or "Latina/o Life Writing: Autobiography, Memoir, Testimonio" (The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature. Cambridge UP, 2016: 147-160).
Isabel Durán is the Director of the Complutense Research Group "Estudios de género en el ámbito de los países de habla Inglesa" (Gender Studies in the Anglophone World), and has just been a recipient of a Research Project entitled “Gender and Pathography from a Transatlantic Perspective (2021-2024). She has supervised 13 Doctoral dissertations. She has been a researcher at Harvard University through the Real Colegio Complutense (2012) and a Fulbright scholar (2000). She has lectured at various Spanish universities and institutions, as well as at the Universities of Bielefeld (Germany), Olomouc (Czech Republic), Aarhus and Copenhagen (Denmark), Buenos Aires (Argentina), USPI (Brazil), and at the North American universities of Harvard, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, UCLA, Dartmouth College and Georgia State. She is currently part of a European research team on Gender and Aging Studies.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6026-0184 // Google Scholar // Scopus // Publons/Researcher ID: Q-4764-2018
Noelia Hernando-Real
Noelia Hernando-Real is Associate Professor of English and American Literature at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain). She received her Ph. D. in British and North-American Literature (Doctor Europeus Mention) from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, where she held a FPU Fellowship for four years which also enabled her to do research at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland). She has been a Visiting Researcher at Trinity College Dublin, under the auspices of the the Spanish Ministry of Universities (Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia) and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (CA2/RSUE/2021-00383). Her research interests focus on contemporary US women playwrights. Noelia Hernando-Real has given papers at major national and international conferences, such as SSAWW, SAAS, ALA and ATDS, on the works of 20th and 21st-century American women playwrights. She has published over 50 book chapters, articles and reviews, which have appeared in prestigious and peer-reviewed journals such as the Eugene O’Neill Review, the New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Annual, Revue francais d'etudes nordamericans, Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos or Critical Stages, among others, and publishing houses such as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer or Peter Lang. She is a member of the Complutense Research Group "Estudios de género en el ámbito de los países de habla Inglesa" (Gender Studies in the Anglophone World), and has been a member of four funded Research Projects: “Space, Gender and Identity in North-American Literature and Visual Arts: A Trans-Atlantic Approach” (2013-2016, funded by Instituto Benjamin Franklin-Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Head Researcher: Carmen Méndez),“The Discourse and the Representation of Space as a Determining Factor, Transforming and Creating Body and Gender Identities, in Anglo-American and Canadian Literature and Theatre, from the End of the 20th Century to the Present” (2009-2012, FFI 2009-12221, funded by Ministry of Science and Innovation. Head researcher: Antonia Rodríguez Gago), "Refiguring the Body: Reinventions of Transnational Identities in Contemporary British, North American and Canadian Theatre and Fiction” (2004-2007, HUM 2004- 00515, funded by Ministry of Science and Innovation, Head researcher: Antonia Rodríguez Gago), and Voices and Images of the New Millennium: Multiculturalism and Gender Representations in Contemporary Anglo-American and Canadian Literature” (1999-2002, PB98-0101, funded by Ministry of Science and Innovation,Head researcher: Antonia Rodríguez Gago). She has served as President of the International Susan Glaspell Society and serves now as a member of its Exectutive Council.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-9911-8951 // Google Scholar // Scopus //
Publons/Researcher ID: HMP-6178-2023
Francisco Cortés Vieco
Francisco José Cortés Vieco is Associate Professor and, since 2013, he lectures on Gender Studies and English Literature in the Department of English Studies at Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (Alcalá University –‘Francisca de Nebrija’ Award for Best Thesis 2020 and Outstanding Thesis Award 2018-2019) and a PhD in Literary Studies (UCM- Outstanding Thesis Award 2012-2013). In 2018, Dr. Cortés Vieco was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States), thanks to the postdoctoral research scholarship awarded to him by the Real Colegio Complutense (RCC)-Harvard University. In addition, he has participated in several continuing education courses at University of Oxford (2008), University of Edinburgh (2016), and University of Cambridge (2017). Dr. Cortés Vieco has been a speaker in many conferences and congresses on English literature and women’s studies in Spain and abroad, and he is also the author of almost 40 national and international publications, including a monograph, chapters of books, peer-reviewed articles in journals on literary criticism and gender studies, or edited books with critical introductions and literary translations (two volumes of the poetry of Emily Brontë and Christina Rossetti).
Main areas of expertise: feminism, gender and women’s studies, applied to women’s literature in English-speaking countries, often interrelated to medical humanities, or to the influence of popular culture (such as fairy tales) on women's writings. His research often chooses the following subject matters: the female body and biology, women’s sexuality, eroticism, sexual reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth and maternity, domestic and gender violence, nervous and psychosomatic disorders, trauma and suicide, with emphasis on approaches from French feminist theory and literary criticism, writing therapy and psychoanalysis. His most recent research projects revolve around the autobiographies, novels and poetry of women writers from the 19th and 20th centuries, notably the following authors: Charlotte Brontë, Edith Wharton, Jean Rhys, Anaïs Nin, Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Angela Carter, Anne Sexton, Joyce Carol Oates or Cherríe Moraga. In 2021, Peter Lang Oxford has published his monograph called Bearing Liminality, Laboring White Ink: Pregnancy and Childbirth in Women's Literature.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7280-6092 // Google Scholar // Scopus //
Publons/Researcher ID: AAO-1338-2020
David Yagüe González
Dr. David Yagüe González is a lecturer at the Global Languages department at MIT. He earned his doctorate in Hispanic Studies at Texas A&M University in 2021, where he also co-founded the Latinx Cultural Production working group with Alberto Moreiras. He has a PhD in African American literature from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with a dissertation that mainly focused in Toni Morrison’s works and trauma. He worked at Harvard University as a Teaching Assistant at the Romance Languages and Literatures department as an instructor in Spanish, where he is the co-chair of the Transatlantic Studies research group. He has published articles on biopolitics, animality and gender with his article “Animalidad y Animalización en Amores Perros” published in Miriada Hispánica (2017) as well as his article on masculinity in Cuban film “Looking For Something to Signify. Gender Performance and Cuban Masculinity in Viva” to published on Screen Bodies (2020) as well as co-edited the volumes Shinning Signs of the Day. Space and Senses in Transatlantic Culture (2019) and Wall to Wall. Law as Culture in Latin American and Spanish Context (2021).
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-1857-2202 // Academia.edu //
Publons/Researcher ID: ABF-8091-2020
Laura Rodríguez Arnaiz
Laura Rodríguez Arnaiz is a predoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing and another one in English Studies from Complutense University of Madrid, and a Master’s degree in North American Studies from both Complutense University of Madrid and Franklin Institute (Alcalá de Henares University). Her areas of interest include contemporary US American fiction and visual cultures, the medical humanities, trauma studies and gender studies. She is currently working on a PhD thesis on the representations of physical and psychological trauma in the post-9/11 literature from the medical humanities perspective. Her doctoral research is funded by a Research Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPI - MICINN).
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-4350-6162 // Google Scholar // Academia.edu // Research Gate
Carmen M. Méndez García
Dr. Carmen M. Méndez García is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Department of English Studies, Complutense University, Madrid (Spain). Her doctoral dissertation, The Rhetorics of Schizophrenia in the Epigones of Modernism (2003) was based on her research as a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2001 and 2002. She was also a participant in the 2010 Study of the United States Institute on Contemporary American Literature at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, funded by the Spanish Fulbright program and the US Department of State.
Current research and teaching interests include 20th- and 21st-century US literature, postmodernism and contemporary fiction, Medical Humanities, the Countercultures in the US, Spatial studies, Gender studies, and Minority studies (especially Chicana studies). She is a participant in the research projects "Género y Patografía desde una perspectiva transnacional / Gender and Pathography from a Transnational Perspective" (Plan Nacional I+D+i, ref. PID2020-113330-GBI00), and "(Des)Alojo: Viviendas, Materialidad y Subjetividad en la Literatura Estadounidense / (Un)Housing: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature" (Plan Nacional I+D+i, ref. PID2020-115172GB-I00). She led the research group “Space, Gender and Identity in US Literature and Visual Arts: A Transatlantic Approach” (Franklin Institute-UAH), and she is a participant in a research group dealing with Gender Studies in English and American literature at Complutense University.
She was a board member for SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies) from 2019 to 2023, and the coordinator of the Master’s in North American Studies at Universidad Complutense de Madrid-UAH, from 2015 to 2021. She was a member of the International Committee of the American Studies Association (ASA) from 2012-15. She served as an Associate Dean for Student Affairs (2010-2014) and as the managing editor of Atlantis, Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies (2009-2012).
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-2997-4269 // Google Scholar // Scopus // Academia.edu // Research Gate // Publons/Researcher ID: F-8403-2013
Claudia Alonso-Recarte
Claudia Alonso Recarte is Associate Professor of English at the University of Valencia. In the last few years, her research has fundamentally revolved around the field of (Critical) Animal Studies, with a particular focus on animal ethics within different literary and performative arts. In questioning how representations of nonhuman animal otherness implicate the correspondence between ethics and aesthetics, her work has inevitably intersected with other fields and concerns such as gender-based identities, ethnicities, historiography, performativity, and national sentiment. Some of her more recent work may be found in academic journals such as Gender, Place and Culture; Studies in Theatre and Performance; Atlantis; Journal for Critical Animal Studies; Critical Studies on Terrorism; and Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens. She is also currently a member in a national research project on animals on the contemporary French stage, financed by the Ministry of Science, Economy and Competitiveness (ACTZOO), and in an ERA Gender-Net Plus Project on aging masculinities in current European film and literature (MASCAGE).
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-3719-8930 // Google Scholar // Scopus // Publons/Researcher ID: GDL-2028-2022
Rebeca Gualberto Valverde
Rebeca Gualberto Valverde works as Associate Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she teaches at the Department of English Studies. In 2015 she completed her PhD in Literary Studies with honours at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she also got her BA in English in 2009 and her MA in Literary Studies in 2010. Her PhD dissertation, titled Representation and Reinterpretation of the Waste Land Myth in Anglo-American Literature, explores varied processes of representation and reinterpretation of the Arthurian myth of the Waste Land at different stages of the Anglo-American literary tradition, from the English Renaissance to American Postmodernism. With the financial aid of a UCM scholarship, she carried out part of her doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh, UK, where she stayed as a visiting postgraduate student in 2013. Besides her literary and philological background, Prof. Gualberto also has work experience and an academic background in education. She holds a MA in Teaching by UNED (National Distance Education University) and has taught in the field of education in the Faculty of Humanities at Isabel I International University and in the Department of Education, Behaviour and Society at the European University of Madrid.
Her academic interests and fields of research mostly focus on the study of myths and of mythical representation in literature as a critical prism to explore literature and culture from a social, political and ideological perspective. She has published several articles in scholarly journals and chapters in scientific volumes, most of them examining post-medieval reinterpretations of Arthurian mythology, be that in Renaissance drama, in modernism, or in the works of contemporary novelists. She has also published some of her work on mythical representation and intertextuality in contemporary popular culture. She is most interested in modernist studies, amd her most recent research explores myth-criticism within the fields of medical humanities and metamodernism.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-1474-1577 // Google Scholar // Scopus // Publons/Researcher ID: H-7763-2017
Laura de la Parra Fernández
Laura de la Parra Fernández is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where she teaches British and American Literature. She is currently the Academic Coordinator of the MA in American Studies at UCM-UAH. She obtained her PhD in English from Complutense University of Madrid (Extraordinary Degree Award; "Félix Martín" Best Thesis in American Studies Award) with a dissertation entitled "Against Love: Women, Madness and the State (1939-1954)", dealing with the representation of female madness in mid-twentieth century narratives. Her doctoral research was fully funded by a Research Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU-MECD). She has been a visiting scholar at Birkbeck College, University of London and Harvard University, with the support of the Spanish Ministry of Education and the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard. In Spring 2023 she will be a visiting scholar at Project Narrative at Ohio State University thanks to a "Ruth Lee Kennedy" Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Laura’s main research interests are gender studies, affect theory, experimental women’s writing, 20th and 21st century British and American literature, and the medical humanities.
ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0658-9576 // Google Scholar // Scopus // Academia.edu //
Publons/Researcher ID: AAA-9934-2019
Isabel Marqués López
Isabel Marqués López is a predoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her areas of interest include contemporary US American (non)fiction, 21st century women’s writing, autobiography theory and affect theory. She holds a Bachelor's degree in English Studies and a Master's degree in Advanced Studies in Literature and Film in English, both from the University of Zaragoza. She is currently working on a PhD thesis on narratives and testimonies of sexual harassment after the #MeToo movement in US literature and media, including works by Chanel Miller, Myriam Gurba, Carmen Aguirre and Siri Hustvedt. Her doctoral research is funded by a Research Fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education.
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7697-5459 // Academia.edu // ResearchGate
External advisors
Thomas Cole (University of Texas)
Franziska Gygax (University of Basel)
Ignacio Lizasoain (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)