Contact

• workRoom B34.5 Trent
• work0115 95 15804
• adam.sharman@nottingham.ac.uk

Teaching Summary

I teach mostly Spanish American literature, along with other aspects of Spanish American cultural life (film, intellectual history). I contribute to a first-year course on literature, teach half of a… read more

Research Summary

I am currently writing a book on Michel Foucault, called Foucault in the Age of Neo-liberalism.

My latest published work is a jointly edited volume called Other '68s: Lineages and Legacies of May '68, published in January 2025. It is based on a conference we held to mark the 50th anniversary of the events in France and elsewhere. I contribute an essay on Jacques Derrida's meditation on intellectual work of opposition in the context of democracy, which he wrote in April-June of 1968.

Recent Publications

• ADAM SHARMAN and ALVARO VIDAL BOUZON, eds., 2025. Other '68s: Lineages and Legacies of May '68 Peter Lang.
• 2025. The Ends of Revolution: Derrida and the 'Thought of '68'. In: ADAM SHARMAN and ALVARO VIDAL BOUZON, eds., Other '68s: Lineages and Legacies of May '68 37. Peter Lang. 324
• 2020. Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America: Margins of Modernity Palgrave Macmillan.
• ADAM SHARMAN, 2017. On the Use and Abuse of History in Post-Dictatorship Argentine History. In: ADAM SHARMAN, ed., MemoSur/MemoSouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile First. Critical, Cultural, and Communications Press. 359-374

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I teach mostly Spanish American literature, along with other aspects of Spanish American cultural life (film, intellectual history). I contribute to a first-year course on literature, teach half of a second-year module on literature and film, and do a final-year module called Spanish American Narrative.

I also teach Spanish language, principally now translation from Spanish into English.

Past Research

My previous work has mostly been on Spanish American literature. I published a book called Tradition and Modernity in Spanish American Literature with Palgrave Macmillan in 2007. That book is a meditation on the relationship between two impossibly large and vague things which yet have real purchase in life and letters: Tradition, on the one hand, and Modernity, on the other. The book is also, however, a meditation on the relationship between literature and the new kid on the block in Latin American studies, i.e. cultural studies. In the book I deal with certain theoretical issues and then move on to look at Spanish American modernismo, at Borges, Vallejo, Rulfo, and Carpentier's great novel on the impact of the French Revolution in the Caribbean, El siglo de las luces. I published an edited volume of essays on Vallejo in 1997, The Poetry and Poetics of Cesar Vallejo.

My recent work includes a short monograph, Otherwise Engaged: After Hegel and the Philosophy of History, on what to make of Hegel's Philosophy of History, especially when the voluble rejections of Hegel's philosophy of the modern age sound suspiciously like confirmations of Hegel's logic. I also co-edited a volume of essays, 1812 Echoes: The Cadiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics, on the legacy of Spain's 1812 Constitution.

My last single-authored monograph was Deconstructing the Enlightenment In Spanish America: Margins of Modernity. I look at five instances of the modern from five different spheres of cultural-intellectual life (science, natural law, history, the periodical press, and literature) in the Spanish American colonies before Independence, i.e. before the second decade of the nineteenth century. Part of the project undoubtedly involves saying: 'Look, there are moments of the modern there where one does not expect to find them.' But another large part involves questioning the very idea we have of modernity, and perhaps above all shaking the all-too-comforting notion that modernity is a simple thing that arrives en bloc rather like a refrigerated ship into a new port for the first time.

Future Research

I am currently working on the Foucault book; after that, I shall be working on the Culture of Revolution in Spanish America. Not only, most obviously, work of the 1960s and 1970s in the region, but work done since which has, sometimes unwittingly, drawn on the content and tropes of the revolutionary tradition.

• ADAM SHARMAN and ALVARO VIDAL BOUZON, eds., 2025. Other '68s: Lineages and Legacies of May '68 Peter Lang.
• 2025. The Ends of Revolution: Derrida and the 'Thought of '68'. In: ADAM SHARMAN and ALVARO VIDAL BOUZON, eds., Other '68s: Lineages and Legacies of May '68 37. Peter Lang. 324
• 2020. Deconstructing the Enlightenment in Spanish America: Margins of Modernity Palgrave Macmillan.
• ADAM SHARMAN, 2017. On the Use and Abuse of History in Post-Dictatorship Argentine History. In: ADAM SHARMAN, ed., MemoSur/MemoSouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile First. Critical, Cultural, and Communications Press. 359-374
• ADAM SHARMAN, 2017. Introduction: MemoSouth-A Note for Europe. In: ADAM SHARMAN, ed., MemoSur/MemoSouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile First. Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. 7-31
• ADAM SHARMAN, ed., 2017. MemoSur/MemoSouth: Memory, Commemoration and Trauma in Post-Dictatorship Argentina and Chile 1st. Critical, Cultural and Communications Press.
• SHARMAN, A., 2013. Sovereign deposits, divided loyalties: the 1812 Spanish Constitution. In: ROBERTS, S.G.H. and SHARMAN, A., eds., 1812 echoes: the Cadiz Constitution in Hispanic history, culture and politics Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 86-102
• SHARMAN, A., 2013. Otherwise engaged: after Hegel and the Philosophy of History Critical, Cultural and Communications Press. (In Press.)
• ROBERTS, S.G.H. and SHARMAN, A., eds., 2013. 1812 echoes: the Cadiz Constitution in Hispanic history, culture and politics Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• 2013. Vallejo Fragments. In: Politics, Poetics, Affect: Re-visioning Cesar Vallejo 1st. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 89-100
• SHARMAN, A., 2011. Latin American modernity, and yet... Bulletin of Latin American Research. 30(4), 488-501
• SHARMAN, A, 2011. The state and the muse: Trilce VI and the politics of poetry. In: CARPENTER, V., ed., A world in words, a life in texts: revisiting Latin American cultural heritage: Festschrift in honour of Peter R. Beardsell Peter Lang.
• SHARMAN, A., 2007. The indiscrete charm of the bourgeoisie, or, the difficulty of going beyond the subject of the nation: Gutiérrez Alea's Memorias del subdesarrollo Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool). 84(5), 645-660
• SHARMAN, A., 2006. Tradition and modernity in Spanish American literature: from Dario to Carpentier Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• SHARMAN, A., 2004. Jacques Derrida. In: SIMONS, J., ed., Contemporary Critical Theorists: From Lacan to Said Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press. 85-101
• SHARMAN, A., 2003. Review of Robin Fiddian, ed. Postcolonial Perspectives on the Cultures of Latin America and Lusophone Africa (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000) Modern Language Review. 98(3), 747-748
• SHARMAN, A., 2002. Semicolonial times: Vallejo and the discourse of modernity Romance Quarterly. 49(3), 192-205
• SHARMAN, A., 2002. El epistopoema de Vallejo Sileno. 12, 71-77
• SHARMAN, A., 2001. Review of The Politics of Spanish American Modernismo: By Exquisite Design By Gerard Aching. Cambridge Studies in Latin American and Iberian Literature, 11. Cambridge: CUP, 1997, viii + 183pp. ISBN: 0 521 57249 5 Hispanic Research Journal. 2.2(June 2001), 183-84
• SHARMAN, A., 2000. Borges y el tiempo de la ceguera. In: ROWE, W., CANAPARO, C. and LOUIS, A., eds., Jorge Luis Borges: intervenciones sobre pensamiento y literatura Barcelona/Buenos Aires : Paidós. 249-262
• SHARMAN, A., 2000. Review of William Rowe, Hacia una poética radical: ensayos de hermenéutica cultural (Rosario:Beatriz Viterbo Editora/Lima: Mosca Azul Editores, 1996) Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool). LXXVII(1), 148-149
• SHARMAN, A., 1999. Elia Geoffrey Kantaris, The Subversive Psyche: Contemporary, Women Narrative from Argentina and Uruguay Modern Language Review. VOL 94(NUMBER 3), 860-861
• SHARMAN, A., 1999. "Las comillas tienen su importancia": Foucault y la constitución de la "sexualidad". In: FORASTELLI, F. and TRIQUELL, X., eds., Las marcas del género. Configuraciones de la diferencia en la cultura Córdoba : Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. 29-44
• SHARMAN, A., 1997. A máquina teórica: o discurso de Christopher Norris sobre o pós-modernismo na década de noventa 5, 39-68
• SHARMAN, A., 1997. Introduction. In: SHARMAN, A., ed., The Poetry and Poetics of César Vallejo. The fourth angle of the circle Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Press. xiv-xxiii
• SHARMAN, A., 1997. The poetry and poetics of Cesar Vallejo : the fourth angle of the circle Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Press.
• SHARMAN, A., 1997. Vallejo's Personae: At the Limits of Formalism. In: SHARMAN, A., ed., The Poetry and Poetics of César Vallejo. The Fourth Angle of the Circle Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Press. 117-136