The works of Pietro Bembo (1470-1547) intrigue readers approaching them from various angles… Here, my aim is modest: to highlight passages in Bembo’s literary texts which exploit the erotic lexicon so popular in his day.

El Cid Campeador, obra teatral de Antonio Enríquez Gómez (1660-1663), se publicó reiteradamente a lo largo del siglo XVIII y los primeros años del XIX. La obra, casi desconocida hoy en día, gozó de una popularidad enorme entre 1700 y 1830, tanto en el teatro como en la imprenta, debido en parte a su tema histórico y el estilo barroco, tan de gus…[Read more]

This paper is the project narrative for a grant proposal submitted in February 2019, that resulted in funding from two different sources to cover travel expenses in support of archival work in Spain (summer 2019). I share this project narrative to encourage others who are considering similar proposals, or who may be thinking about the scholarly…[Read more]

A very critical overview of seemingly disparate films

A report published by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission this week, ‘Elitist Britain’, found that two fifths (39%) of Britain’s ‘leading people’ were educated privately, more than five times as many as in the population as a whole, with almost one quarter (24%) graduating from Oxbridge. I therefore thought it would be timely to publis…[Read more]

Personal perspective on the current state of open access and publishing practices in the fields of Television and Media Studies, and pointers to a variety of scholar-led initiatives and options of where scholars can actually publish open access in their field without the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs).

Cities of InfraRed is an abstract for my proposed contribution to a book that is being put together by Cornelia Sollfrank, Shuhsa Niederberger and Felix Stalder. The book has the working title of Aesthetics of the Commons, and arises out of the Creating Commons research project at the Zurich University of the Arts.

A version of Cities of…[Read more]

This is a paper that I presented at the 2019 MLA in Chicago. In this paper I situate discussions of the field of Iberian Studies within the context of the crisis of the Humanities and the future of Cultural Studies.

We live in an increasingly übercapitalist society. It’s übercapitalist in that a specific version of neoliberalism, characterised by low pay, zero-hours and fixed-term contracts, is growing ever more aggressive; and that the disruptive technology firm Uber offers one of the most high-profile examples of this intensified form of deregulated cap…[Read more]

This paper attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are the causes of political changes in Africa in the 21st century? Are these changes people-led? What are the challenges militating against people-led political changes in Africa? The paper takes a look at the nature of the post-colonial states of Africa since the Cold War…[Read more]