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Biography
My research interests are poetry in English and the major Romance languages, literary translation, Hispanic and Portuguese religious painting in the Renaissance and Baroque, festal culture in the same period, and nineteenth-century opera on Hispanic themes. This is a varied range, tied together by an overarching interest in projections of Hispanic identities across genre, discipline and era. I have published on all of these areas and supervised or am in the process of supervising post-graduate research on some of these areas.
Apart from academic work, my interest in poetry is also hands-on. My own poetry and my translations can be accessed on my website.
Teaching Summary
Undergraduate and MA Teaching
Painting and Visual Culture: I offer one semester of a second year module on painting in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the Portuguese settlements in the Far East from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century. We look at how the development of these two extensive empires is reflected in art.
I run a final year module on painting in Spain from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century.
Both modules include aspects of curatorship - organising exhibitions, writing exhibition notes etc.
Literature: My contribution to our first year Literature module is on a recent novel (2017) by the Latin American writer, Isabel Allende, Mas Allá del Invierno/In the Midst of Winter, a novel which deals with the very pertinent themes of migration and political persecution.
I teach a core module Comparative Literature for master's students. We look at twentieth-century short stories written in the languages of three of the former European colonial nations and two non-European cultures and discuss the expression of national, local, class and ethnic identities, and the evolution of the modern short story from folktale to the present day.
In the past, I have taught or contributed to modules on Spanish Golden Age theatre, Spanish cinema, Spanish poetry and photography, and travel writing related to Iberia. As far as possible I try to include creative exercises in my modules. I believe that creative exercises help students to get inside the texture of the pieces they are studying and they provide an different kind of experience to conventional exams and essay questions.
Research Supervision I can supervise on early modern topics (literature, painting, festal and religious culture), nineteenth-century travel writing, writing by women, painting, projections of national, regional and local identities, twentieth-century poetry, and translation, especially in relation to poetry or literature in general.
Research Summary
Philippine History Retrieval Project - Portugal: a collaboration with a group of distinguished Lusitanist colleagues on the translation of c.80 documents from Spanish and Portuguese into English… read more
Current Research
Philippine History Retrieval Project - Portugal: a collaboration with a group of distinguished Lusitanist colleagues on the translation of c.80 documents from Spanish and Portuguese into English related to the Portuguese presence in and around the Philippines between 1510-1580. The project is funded by the Philippines government and the translation work on this compendium of texts was managed by Jeremy Roe at the Centre for Early Modern History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Publication in hard copy is expected in the Philippines in 2024.
Arising from this project, I also put together a short study of an interchange of letters between the Portuguese captain on the Maluku island of Ternate and the Spanish adventurer who eventually named the Philippines after Philip II in the early 1540s. This piece is at present under consideration by a journal.
Charles V - my current book project is a brief biography of the Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain Charles V, due for completion in the Spring of 2025. It is hard to find a new angle on such a major Renaissance figure. I am mining my own interest in visual culture across the Hispanic early modern world as a way into this massive topic.
Contemporary Poetry and Translation - I have a longstanding interest in women's twentieth century poetry of the interwar and post-war years. I have published on Carmen Conde and Lucía Sánchez Saornil, among others, and translated one of Carmen Conde's collections, Mientras los hombres mueren. My present plans involve translating the forgotten Portuguese poet, Maria Valupi into English and a couple of short publications on Conde.
Past Research
Research I began my research as a comparatist, looking at developments in late nineteenth and early twentieth century literature in relation to representations of the periphery and peasant culture. Over the years I have expanded into early modern Hispanic (including the Spanish and Portuguese empires) religious painting, devotional and festal culture and poetry; twentieth-century women's war poetry; projections of national and local identities in opera and music theatre and occasionally cinema; travel writing on nineteenth and twentieth-century Iberia; translation of poetry in to English.
Research Supervision I have supervised PhD theses on a wide range of topics: early modern convent culture, representations of the early modern city, nineteenth-century journals for a female target audience, exhibition culture and travel writing, contemporary poetry in Spanish, translation in the early modern and contemporary periods, chronicles of the New World, modern poetry. My current PhD students are working on Spanish religious art of the seventeenth century, the translation of Spanish Civil War poetry into English, one of the earliest Spanish chronicles of the New World and the theme of nostalgia in post-WWII writing.
Future Research
Poetry under Dictatorship in Tewntieth Century Iberia - I am working towards translating the work of a broader range of mid-twentieth century women poets living and writing under dictatorship in Spain and Portugal. Although there has been, for some time, a resurgence of interest in the work of women poets during this period, many of these writers remain in the shadows still. Translating their work into English may serve to bring them to some sort of belated prominence.
The painter Vicente López Portaña - nineteenth-century royal portraitist and society portraitist, friend of Goya, the most successful and best known of a Valencian dynasty of nineteenth-century painters, Vicente López is much admired but little written about. I am hoping that I can make some contribution to what is out there on his distinguished career.