Research Seminars

"Nation Branding in Latin America"

Felix Lossio Chavez (Newcastle University)
Discussant: Paulo Drinot (UCL)

Contested Authority and Indigenous Film Collaborations: Sey Arimaku (Pablo Mora, Colombia, 2012) and O Mestre e o Divino (Tiago Campos, Brazil, 2013)'

Charlotte Gleghorn (University of Edinburgh)

"The generation game: Podemos, Javier Cercas and the (im)possibility of progressive politics in Spain"

Duncan Wheeler (University of Leeds)

19th-century fusion food, irony and portuguesismo: Júlio Dinis's scrambled Portuguese eggs

Hazel Robins (Cambridge)

'Gathering Food Narratives: Problems, Surprises, Questions'

Rhian Atkin (Cardiff)

Mário Peixoto: Vanguard Film and Literature in Brazil in the 1930s

Maite Conde (Cambridge) and Felipe Botelho Correa (King's College London)

The Role of the Producer in Latin American Cinemas

Sarah Barrow (University of Lincoln)

Francisco Umbral: discurso antinacionalista 

Guillermo Laín Corona (UNED, Madrid)

Desmembramiento de un cuerpo, deriva de un país: El caso de Rosa Faundes Cavieres

Alia Trabucco (UCL)

Alberto Fuguet y su novela Aeropuertos: Una lectura de la igualdad política de las mujeres en la literatura chilena de la post-transición a la democracia

Denisse Lazo (Oxford)

Displacements, decenterings: novels without frontier (FAPESP/ British Academy)

• Considerations on the Brazilian rise of the novel

Dr. Jorge de Almeida, Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, University of São Paulo

• 'Foreign Places, Strange Words: Defamiliarization and the Novel in the Burtons' Iracema and Ng's Upheaval in Far Cathay'

Dr Ross G. Forman, English and Comparative Literary Studies, Warwick

• "Unsterning" Machado de Assiss's The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

Professor Sandra Vasconcelos, Professor of English Literature, University of São Paulo

• Reforming the novel in late-colonial India: Krupabai Satthianathan's Saguna

Dr. Tara Puri, Lecturer in Victorian Literature, University of Bristol

Jason Wilson (UCL)

Jorge Luis Borges and W. H. Hudson.

I will glance at how much Borges knew about W. H. Hudson. He first mentioned Hudson's work in 1925 as 'más nuestras que una pena' and last mentions him in 1952. He read him in English, but saw him as part of the 'tragedia gauchesca'. But what did he read and who was Hudson? 

Professor John Kraniauskas (Birkbeck)

Narco-Culture, Narco-Accumulation
In this presentation I will reflect upon a constellation of notions that together will outline the parameters of a concept: 'narco-accumulation'. I will do so with the help of cultural materials: novels and films from the USA and Mexico such as Don Winslow's The Power of the Dog and The Cartel as well 'narco-novelas' by Victor Hugo Rascón Banda (Contrabando), Elmer Mendoza (Balas de plata) and Yuri Herrera (Trabajos del reino). Crucial to such an endeavour are the geopolitical and cultural - including literary - histories of the Mexican and US hinter- and border-lands. It is particularly to the history of this non-national 'territory' that I will turn to understand the narco-present.

Dr Javier Muñoz Basols (University of Oxford)

Del inglesismo al anglicismo: huellas y testimonios de la influencia de la lengua inglesa en la tradición hispánica

En esta ponencia haremos una incursión en el análisis de la influencia croslingüística léxica (Muñoz-Basols y Salazar 2016) que de manera recíproca han ejercido el inglés y el español a lo largo de la historia. Para ello nos detendremos en el cotejo de huellas textuales y de testimonios que nos permiten entender parte de la génesis de las actitudes hacia los anglicismos en la tradición hispánica. Toda esta información nos servirá para abordar una de las preocupaciones de mayor urgencia de la lexicografía actual, la revisión del tratamiento de los extranjerismos en el Diccionario de la lengua española (DRAE), y que fenómenos como la globalización, el multilingüismo, o la emergencia de nuevas variedades dialectales, como es el caso del español estadounidense, ponen constantemente en tela de juicio.

Professor Daniel Balderston (University of Pittsburg)

This talk focuses on two manuscripts of Borges's "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" (The Garden of Forking Paths), and will show how Borges composed, both in early stages in composition notebooks  and in subsequent copies (still much corrected) which are closer to fair or presentation copies. It is part of a book I have just finished, How Borges Wrote. The talk will include a PowerPoint presentation with images of the two manuscripts.

Dr Francisco J Hernandez Adrian (Durham University)

Excess and playfulness in Latin American film: the seascape scene from Y tu mamá también to Post tenebras lux.

In a series of early 21st-century Latin American films, urban ruins and 'naturescapes' appear to be connected with images of economic catastrophe and cultural decay on the one hand, and of social reconstruction and political recovery on the other. While these images issue from specific local and national contexts, an emergent, trans-regional and globally-inflected visuality also suggests a planetary cinematic consciousness playfully exceeding long-standing approaches to Latin American national cinemas. Focusing on two films by Mexican directors Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, 2001) and Carlos Reygadas (Post tenebras lux, 2012), this talk considers the figure of the shore or littoral zone in seascape scenes at the conceptual juncture of affective, perceptive and sensorial cultural traffickings.

Professor Catherine Boyle (King's College London)

Translating, Feminist Knots and Cultural History

With reference to the idea of strong voices, this talk will explore the relationship between the academic self and the questions that are posed through the process of translation. In respect of my recent work, this has led to the study of connections in social, labour and feminist histories between Europe and Latin America. I will pose the questions through translation processes related to three Chilean women: Gabriela Mistral, Isidora Aguirre and Violeta Parra.