Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Research in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The Department of Spanish and Portuguese aims to foster active research in literature, linguistics and culture across the fields in which it has specialist researchers: Medieval Spanish; Golden Age; 19th- and 20th-century Spain (including Catalan studies); 19th-and 20th-century Spanish American; Portugal, Brazil and Lusophone Africa; and Hispanic linguistics. As well as traditional subject specialisms, there are clusters of research interest in specific areas: diachronic syntax, cinema, gender studies, cultural studies informed by critical theory, and visual culture. Overview of research areas of Spanish and Portuguese Staff Current and former research students Cambridge Hispanic Research Seminar Cambridge (Ibero)Romance Linguistics Seminar Research events including the annual Norman MacColl Symposium.Current and Recent Collaborative Projects:
Professor Alison Sinclair (2011-2014)
Awarded £600,765 by the AHRC to fund her three-year research project on ‘Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936: Realities, Representations, Reactions’. The intention of the project is to explore society’s understanding of wrongdoing, and the way that this is translated into the world of culture. It is thus concerned not just with wrongdoing, but with the social and cultural responses it elicits. Such responses include anxiety, anger, desire for retribution, identification with perpetrators or victims of wrongdoing, the potential for vicarious engagement with wrongdoing through cultural artefacts. It allows for questioning of the processes through which it is evident that we, as cultural consumers, take a type of pleasure in wrongdoing. The evident public fascination with it can be traced from medieval ballad through to nineteenth-century broadsides, and eventually to sensationalist literary or visual representations of wrongdoing in our day. Included in the project is the digitization and cataloguing of ephemeral material in the University Library, Cambridge, and the British Library.Dr Rodrigo Cacho (2009/2011)
Member of the international research project of the Edición anotada de la obra completa en prosa de Quevedo, directed by Alfonso Rey, University of Santiago de Compostela.Research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Newton Trust, undertaken with the collaboration of Dr Anne Holloway: 'Golden Age Poetry: Centres and Peripheries'. The aim of this research project is to establish reliable corpora for the mock epic and other less studied poetic genres of the Golden Age, and to study in detail their respective thematic sources and stylistic features as well illustrate their influential literary role. More broadly, this work will engage in a necessary historical and cultural revision in order to provide a more accurate, rounded and comprehensive picture of Golden Age literary culture.
Dr Louise M. Haywood and Prof. J. E. Montgomery (FAMES) (2009)
'Two Spains: España and Al-Andalus; Tolerance and Translatio', CRASSH seminar series, Lent term 2009.
The project examines two primary tropes in terms of which al-Andalus and España are construed as phenomena: translatio and tolerance. Other (cognate) tropes are adduced to account for them, chief among them being influence and transmission, whose study is often characterized by a circularity of reading and reasoning. The seminar maps the imbrication of these tropes and practices which characterizes the current study of the literary heritage of al-Andalus and España. We thus investigate whether an integrated study of this literary heritage is possible.
Dr Dominic Keown (2009/2011)
Member of the research project co-ordinated by Dr Margalida Pons of the Universitat de les Illes Balears, La Poesia Experimental Catalan del Periode 1970-1990: Discursos, Representacions, Recepció, Infraestructures de Difusió y Marc Socieocultural.After their successful and controversial analysis of the innovative discourses of post-Franco Catalan culture, Poètiques de ruptura, the team of investigators organised by the Universitat de les Illes Balears has extended the focus of their investigation to consider all aspects of creative experiment during the period concerned, as anticipated by the orientation of the conference held in Palma in July 2009, Transformacions: Literatura i canvi sociocultural dels anys setanta ençà.
The project, which includes scholars from universities in Spain, the UK and the USA, is in receipt of an award from the Ministerio de Educación y Cultura.
