Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico — Principal Investigator

Dr. Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico is Professor of North American Literature and Dean of the School of Philology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). She previously served as Vice-Provost for International Affairs at UCM (2015-2019), Chair of the Department of English Philology II (2013-2015), and President of SAAS, the Spanish Association for American Studies (2015-2019). She was also an elected member of the General Council of the American Studies Association (ASA) from 2008 to 2011.

Her research focuses on gender studies, medical humanities, autobiography, ethnicity, and transnational American studies. Her publications include the editing of an eight-volume collection on gender studies, and she is the author of over eighty scholarly articles and book chapters. Among her recent and selected publications are: “The Violent ‘Trojan Horse’: A Comparative, Transnational Reading of Two Paralysis Narratives” (The European Journal of Life Writing, vol. XIII, 2024); “What Is the ‘Transnational Turn’ in American Literary Studies? A Critical Overview” (Atlantis, vol. 42.2, 2020, pp. 138-159); “Transnationalism, Autobiography and Criticism: The Spaces of Women’s Imagination” (The Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies, Routledge, 2019, pp. 202-213); “Between Molds and Models: Female Identities in Almudena Grandes and Roberta Fernández” (Symbolism, vol. 17, 2017, pp. 143-167); and “Latina/o Life Writing: Autobiography, Memoir, Testimonio” (The Cambridge Companion to Latina/o American Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2016, pp. 147-160).

She is Director of the Complutense Research Group Gender Studies in the Anglophone World, is currently Co-Principal Investigator of the research project Illness Narratives: Towards a Gendered Health(care) Awareness (2025-2028), and  has been a member of a European research network on Gender and Aging Studies. She has supervised fourteen doctoral dissertations.

Dr. Durán has been a visiting researcher at Harvard University (2012) and University of California Santa Barbara (2020) and a Fulbright Scholar (2000). She has lectured widely at Spanish and international universities, including the Universities of Bielefeld, Olomouc, Aarhus, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires and USPI (Brazil), as well as at several North American institutions such as Harvard University, the University of California (Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara and UCLA), Dartmouth College, and Georgia State University. 

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6026-0184 // Google Scholar // Scopus // Publons/Researcher ID: Q-4764-2018

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

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

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  //  Publons/Researcher ID: JWP-5835-2024

Francisco Cortés Vieco — Principal Investigator

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

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 20^th and 21^st-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

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

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