Speakers

Bárbara Bom Angelo is a journalist and a master’s student in English Linguistic and Literary Studies at the University of São Paulo (FFLCH/USP). Under the supervision of Professors Dr. Laura Izarra and Dr. Mariana Bolfarine, she researches the portrayal of Irish youth in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the novels of Sally Rooney.

María Amor Barros-del Río is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Burgos, Spain, and serves as Secretary of AEDEI (The Spanish Association for Irish Studies). Her research focuses on contemporary Irish literature, particularly women's writing. She is the author of Metáforas de su Tierra: Breve Historia de las Mujeres Irlandesas (Septem, 2004), the co-author of A Practical Guide to Address Gender Bias in Academia and Research (Fundación General de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, 2016), and the editor of Transcultural Insights into Contemporary Irish Literature and Society: Breaking New Ground (Routledge, 2024). Her work has been recognized by positive reviews in international journals, grants and awards received to date.

Paddy Brennan is completing a Blair Chair-funded PhD at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Irish Studies. His research focuses on depictions of food consumption and self-starvation in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish fiction. He has contributed a chapter to the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Sally Rooney.

Sara Alvarez Diaz is a second-year PhD candidate from the University of Oviedo. Amongst her areas of interest, literature and cultural studies lie at the centre. Since graduating with a degree in English Studies, and completing her master's degree, her academic research has focused on the study of pop culture and contemporary Irish literature. Her PhD thesis explores the representation of female emotions and trauma during the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Ireland. She has presented several papers at seminars and international conferences and has a couple of forthcoming articles in indexed academic papers. 

Keah Amy Dixon is a PhD candidate and English-language teacher based in A Coruña, Spain. She holds a master’s degree in Advanced English Studies from the Universidade da Coruña, for which she was awarded the Premio Extraordinario, and is a member of Amergin, the University Institute of Research in Irish Studies. She is the author of ‘“It is time for her to dislocate this ‘within’”: Heterotopias, Concealment and Endometriosis in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends" in Post-Urban Spaces in Contemporary Irish Fiction (2023), edited by David Clark and Eduardo Barros. Her research interests include contemporary British and Irish literature, feminist studies and cultures in translation. 

M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo is a lecturer in American literature at UNED (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), Spain. She holds a B.A. in English and a PhD in American Studies from the Universidad de Alcalá. She is the author of three books, The Wind is Never Gone: Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind (McFarland, 2011), Early Visions and Representations of America: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios and William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (Bloomsbury, 2013) and A Successful Novel Must be in Want of a Sequel (McFarland, 2018). She has taught undergraduate and graduate courses at several universities and has supervised numerous master’s theses. She has contributed entries to several encyclopedias and reference works. Her work has been published in journals such as Clepsydra, Ad Americam, Sederi, RAEI, The Grove, or Atlantis, among others.

Pilar Iglesias-Aparicio got her English Philology PhD by Málaga University with a thesis about London and Edinburgh Schools of Medicine for Women. She was Language Advisor for the Spanish Embassy in Brazil between 2006 and 2008, and Mentor for the “Community Action Training Fellowship” European Programme, in 2019 and 2020. As an independent researcher, she was awarded the Kate O’Brien Prize by Málaga University Transatlantic Studies Network Institute in 2020, for her comparative study about Ireland Magdalene Laundries and the Spanish Patronage for the Protection of Women. She has run workshops, given lectures, participated in panels and conferences, and published books, book chapters and articles about women and health; pioneer women physicians and their contribution to the deconstruction of misogyny in nineteenth-century scientific-medical discourse; feminist agency and empowerment; feminist literary criticism applied to the study of twenty and twenty-first centuries women writers and gender-based institutional abuse in Ireland and Spain.

Natalia Jiménez-Pérez is a PhD candidate and research fellow at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). In 2024, she was granted a four-year national competitive Research Fellowship financed by the Autonomous Regional Government of Aragon (DGA) to carry out her doctoral research. She is also a member of the research group “Contemporary Narrative in English”, financed by the Government of Aragón (H03_20R). Her present research focuses on Sally Rooney’s fiction as a response to a context of global and national crisis (Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland) and its consequences in the identity formation and development of its youth, analysing the ways in which her fiction interacts, both thematically and formally, with the Irish Literary tradition, as well as the author's proposed relational and affective approach as an antidote to universal precarity. Her main research interests include Irish literature, fantasy and Tolkien studies, medical humanities and vulnerability studies, with a special emphasis on questions of precarity and intimacy.

Silvia Vázquez Lorenzo is a PhD student specialising in Irish literature and culture and is part of University Institute of Research in Irish Studies Amergin at the University of A Coruña. She previously earned a Bachelor's degree in English Studies and a Master's degree in Advanced English Studies at the same university. She participated as speaker in conferences such as “From the Margins: II Conference on Alternative Narratives and Cultural Studies” (UDC, 2018) and “III Congreso Interdisciplinar sobre Literatura e Imagen: Revisiones de la Fantasía y la Aventura en la Literatura y las Artes Visuales” (UCM, 2024). Furthermore, she also took part as organiser of the “I Congreso de Tecnoculturas: Cyborgs Transculturales” (UDC, 2024). She also wrote a chapter for the collection of essays Post-Urban Spaces in Contemporary Fiction: Transcultural Spaces and Places (TIR, 2023). Her main academic interests include Irish literature, disability studies and Cultural Studies.

Karen McCarthy is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. She has published on contemporary Irish literature, John Banville, Irish women’s writing, and the ethics of representation. She completed her doctorate on the representation of women in a selection of John Banville’s recent work in 2022. 

Sofía Alférez Mendía holds a BA and an MA in English Studies from the University of Almería where she is currently a final-year PhD student. Her thesis focuses on the representation and understanding of vulnerability in the works of Sally Rooney. In 2023, she was awarded one of the Internal Research Plan Training Grants from the University of Almería (PPIT-UAL), which has supported her research and enabled her to lecture at the university. Her research interests encompass Irish Literature, Philosophy, Gende Studies, and Feminism.

Elena Canido Muiño's research addresses issues of identity, creativity, culture, and the arts. A multidisciplinary artist herself, she has successfully published articles and presented papers at both national and international conferences on such topics, her primary goal being to defend the essential value of the arts and humanities for individuals and society as a whole. In fact, she obtained her PhD with the interdisciplinary thesis Ireland into the Mystic: The Poetic Spirit and Cultural Content of Irish Rock Music, 1970-2020. She was also awarded for her thesis Creative Muse: The Young Female Artist and the Role of Arts in Women's Künstlerromans. Previously, she had been awarded two Bachelor's degrees in English Philology and Music Studies and Professional Performance. Up until now, not only she has worked in the education field but has also dedicated herself to and is inspired by arts such as literature, music, drama, photography, and film.

Gloria García Pintueles is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at the University of Oviedo (Spain), where she also serves as a lecturer in the Department of English. She holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Hispanic and English Studies from the University of Oviedo, as well as an MA in Women’s and Gender Studies from Utrecht University and the University of Oviedo. Her doctoral research focuses on the intersections of gender, digital culture, and mental health in contemporary Irish women’s literature, with particular emphasis on the works of Sally Rooney. Her most recent work includes a forthcoming book chapter in The Routledge Companion to Sally Rooney, set for publication in 2025. 

Magdalena Flores Quesada holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Málaga, where she currently works as a researcher and lecturer. Her lines of research focus on contemporary British literature with a special interest in fiction written by women, in female relationships, as well as in characters on the social margins. She has worked extensively on vulnerability both in her doctoral thesis and in various articles and book chapters. She is part of the RELY research project, which aims to reflect on the notion of “assemblage” as applied to literary studies.

María Rosa Valle Sánchez is a recent graduate of the MA in Advanced English Studies: Languages and Cultures in Contact and currently a PhD candidate, both at the University of Salamanca. She is also coordinator of the student project Voces Prohibidas: Representación de Tabúes en Literatura Escrita por Mujeres (Forbidden Voices: Representation of Taboos in Literature Written by Women), funded by USAL’s Social Affairs Service. Her research focuses on gender and affect studies, with a special emphasis on female rage, in contemporary anglophone literature, as well as the recovery of Herstories. Yet, it also extends to fields such as Neo-Victorian literature and climate fiction (cli-fi).

Hande Tekdemir is an Associate Professor of English. She has worked at the Western Languages and Literatures Department of Bogazici University, Turkey between 2009-2023. Her research interests include Victorian literature, urban theory and trauma studies. She has published on Walter Benjamin, Edgar Allan Poe, Karen Tei Yamashita and Latife Tekin, along with a number of articles on nineteenth-century travelogues on Constantinople. She is currently based in Bucharest, Romania.

Anna Tengattini is a Ph.D. candidate in English Literary Studies at Complutense University in Madrid. She holds a double master’s degree in English and American Studies from Venice Ca' Foscari University (Italy) and University Paris Cité (France). Her primary academic interests include the intersection of fashion and literature, gender studies and adaptation and film studies. Her current research on Henry James explores plural notions of masculinity through the lens of fashion. She attended the Complutense University Summer School on Medical Humanities: The Bridge Between the Arts and Science. Last October, she presented her paper, Exploring Queer Temporalities in Henry James’s Portrayal of Aging, at the international conference Otros libros por venir: Temporalidades queer en la ficción contemporánea organized by the Complutense research group “Estudios Literarios y Culturales y Estudios de Género”.

Laura Vázquez-González holds a Master's degree in Teaching for Compulsory Secondary Education from the Universidade da Coruña, having also studied at University College Cork as part of her undergraduate degree. Her areas of interest include feminist and sexuality studies, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, theatre and performing studies, 20th/21st Century Irish, British and American Literature, with her dissertation exploring the impact of Anti-Feminism through British dramatic literature.

Jie Wang is a PhD student at the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven. She obtained her B.A degree in English Language and Literature in Yunnan University in 2019 and her M.A degree in Irish Studies in Beijing Foreign Studies University in 2022. In April 2020, she won Government of Ireland International Education Scholarship. Then from January to July 2021, she studied at the School of English, Drama and Film of University College Dublin as an exchange student. At present, she researches Irish women artist novels from the 1880s to the present, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Elke D’hoker. Her research interests lie in the area of modern and contemporary British and Irish literature and gender studies. She has presented her papers at 2023 EFACIS Conference, The 6th International Postgraduate Conference in Irish Studies, BAAHE 2023 Conference, Irish Literature and the Global Marketplace International Conference and ACIS 2024 Conference.