Plenary Speaker
Dr. Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
“Pathographies as a field of Research in American Studies: Theory and Practice”
Dr. Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico is Professor of North American Literature at the English Department of the UCM . She was Vice-Provost for International Affairs at the UCM (2015-2019); President of SAAS (Spanish Association for American Studies) until 2019, and Chair of the Department of English Philology II (2013-2015). She was also Vice-Dean of Students at the Faculty of Philology of the UCM (2006-2010) and coordinator of the Humanities area of the UCM Summer Courses at El Escorial. She has been an elected member of the General Council of ASA(American Studies Association 2008-2011) and is currently a member of the International Committee of that association.
Her research and publication record on gender studies, literature, autobiography and ethnicity include the edition of an eight-volume Gender Studies collection, in addition to more than eighty articles and book chapters. She is the Director of the Complutense Research Group “Gender Studies in the anglophone World”. She has supervised 12 Doctoral dissertations. She has been a Fulbright scholar (2000), and a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University (2012) and UCSB (2019). She has been PI in several national research projects and is currently leading the project entitled “Gender and pathography from a transatlantic perspective” (2021-2024). She has lectured at various Spanish universities and institutions, as well as at the Universities of Bielefeld (Germany), Olomouc (Czech Republic), Aarhus and Copenhagen (Denmark), and at the North American universities of Harvard, Riverside, San Diego, Santa Barbara, UCLA, Dartmouth College and Georgia State.
Workshop Coordinator
Dr. Carmen Laguarta Bueno (Universidad de Zaragoza)
“Overcoming the Blank Page Syndrome: Tips for Planning, Writing and Publishing a Dissertation in American Studies”
Dr. Carmen Laguarta Bueno teaches at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza. She is also a member of the research project “The Posthuman Wound: Subject and Agency in 21st Century North American Fiction” (PID2022-137627NB-I00), led by Drs. Sonia Baelo Allué and Mónica Calvo Pascual. Carmen graduated in English Studies at the University of Zaragoza in June 2015. In February 2021, she received her PhD cum laude after defending her thesis, written under the supervision of Profs. Francisco Collado Rodríguez and Sonia Baelo Allué, and for which she obtained the “Extraordinary Doctorate Award” (granted by the University of Zaragoza). Her present research focuses on contemporary US fiction and her main research interests range from trauma studies to transhumanism, critical posthumanism, and bioethics. She is the author of Representing (Post)Human Enhancement Technologies in Twenty-First Century US Fiction (Routledge, 2022). Her most recent essays include “Mark McClelland’s Upload (2012): The Perils of Leaving Biology Behind to Achieve Virtual Immortality” (Journal of English Studies, 2022), “Richard Powers’s Generosity: An Enhancement (2009): Transhumanism, Metafiction and the Ethics of Increasing Human Happiness Levels through Biotechnology” (Atlantis, 2022) and “Trauma and Existentialism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006)” (Nordic Journal of English Studies, 2019). Carmen has also been an academic visitor at the University of California, Riverside (2018), Trinity College, Dublin (2019) and New York University (2021).