Note on Contributors

Jesús Benito Sánchez

is Full Professor of American literature and culture at Universidad de Valladolid, and formerly, literary theory and English and American literature at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). His main field of research is the ethnic American literatures, which he approaches from a comparative perspective, focusing on interethnic cultural analysis, as well as on transnational perspectives. He is General Editor of the Brill series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature” with Ana Mª Manzanas. He has authored three books: Hospitality in American Literature and Culture (Routledge 2017); Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture (Routledge 2014); and Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film (Routledge 2011). He has served in the executive of different academic associations of English and American studies, including saas, eaas, and aedean.

Puspa Damai

is an Associate Professor of English at Marshall University, US. Dr. Damai has published articles in journals including CR: The New Centennial Review, Discourse, Postcolonial Text, Sanglap, and Postcolonial Interventions. He is currently working on two research projects: a book-length study of hospitality in American multi-ethnic literature, and a collection of essays on South Asian literature.

Cristina Garrigós

is Professor of American Literature at the National University of Distance Education (uned) in Spain, where she has been teaching since 2015. She has taught at different universities in Spain (University Autonomous of Madrid, University of León) and the usa (unc-Chapel Hill, University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), and Texas A&M International). Her research interests include US contemporary literature, film, music, and gender. She has published on authors such as John Barth, Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Giannina Braschi, Rabih Alameddine, Don DeLillo, or Ruth Ozeki. Currently she is working on memory loss in contemporary US fiction. She has been a member of several funded research projects on multiculturalism in the US, ethnic literature, and hospitality.

Amanda Ellen Gerke

is Assistant Professor at the University of Salamanca where she teaches classes on English language, culture and linguistics at the undergrad and postgraduate levels. She has teaching and research experience in various international universities, both in the United States, and in Europe, including George Fox University (US), Portland State University (US) the University of Cambridge (UK), and the University of Coimbra (Portugal), among others. Her work in sociolinguistics started in Portland, Oregon, US, as the director of a non-profit organization that assisted women in prostitution and sex-work, and gave various talks and conference presentations for the government and other ngos, with an emphasis on the ways in which sex-workers and other marginalized people are portrayed and understood through various social lenses, including social discourse. Her research trajectory has included a multidisciplinary focus on approaches in cognition, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and ties these together with cultural studies including border studies, cultures in contact, and hospitality. Gerke has formed part of multiple national and international research groups on hospitality and is currently a linguistic analyst and researcher addressing educational policy according to sociolinguistic representations of students with special needs in the Spanish education system.

Luisa María González Rodríguez

is an Associate Professor in English language and linguistics at the University of Salamanca (Spain), where she combines research on literature and linguistics. Her main field of research is American literature, with an emphasis on the politics and aesthetics of postmodernism and postmodern short fiction and poetry. She is also interested in the use of multicultural literature to develop intercultural competence in foreign language contexts, and in the use of dialect in fiction. She has written on a variety of authors, including John Fowles, Barth, Barthelme, W. H. Gass, Lyn Hejinian, and Sandra Cisneros. Her latest research is related to the topic of hospitality and the poetics of space in Sandra Cisneros and Piri Thomas. She is currently editing a volume entitled Towards New Perspectives on Latinidad in American Literature and Culture to be published by Brill Publishers. She has also participated in numerous research projects on American short story, American poetry and the frontiers of hospitality in US and Europe.

Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan

is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Valladolid. He has published extensively on the relations between Spanish and American literatures and on the short story. His research interests include American literature of the Romantic and Modernist periods. He has written extensively on the reception of Edgar Allan Poe in Spain, on the readings of Wallace Stevens’s work by Spanish poets, and has translated and edited several anthologies of American short fiction.

José R. Ibáñez

is Associate Professor of American Literature and English Studies at the University of Almeria, Spain. He is coeditor of Contemporary Debates on the Short Story (Peter Lang 2007). With Blasina Cantizano, he has published Una llegada inesperada y otras historias (Encuentro 2015), an anthology in Spanish of thirteen stories by Ha Jin. He has also published articles and book chapters on American Southern literature (Flannery O’Connor, André Dubus, Moira Crone, and Tim Gautreaux), the Jewish American short story (Bernard Malamud, Nathan Englander), and on the translation and reception of Edgar Allan Poe among nineteenth and twentieth century Spanish authors.

Laura López Peña

(PhD Universitat de Barcelona, 2013) is currently a lecturer at EU Mediterrani, Universitat de Girona (Spain), where she centers her teaching within the degrees in Tourism and Marketing. She has based her research on the works of Herman Melville, particularly his post-civil war poetry volumes Battle-Pieces (1866) and Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), on which she has published book chapters and articles such as “Dressing Uncivil Neighbor(hood)s. Walt Whitman’s Adhesive Democracy in “Calamus” and Drum-Taps” (2014), “The Fate of Democracy in Clarel and the Creation of a Democratic Poem” (2014); “From Battle-Fields to Mounts of Stones: The Failed Promise of National Renewal in Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Clarel” (2014), and “The ‘fatal embrace of the Deity’: The Critique of American Exceptionalism in Herman Melville’s Clarel (1876)” (2012), among other titles, together with the article on contemporary British playwrights Edward Bond and Sara Kane “Witnesses Inside/Outside the Stage. The Purpose of Representing Violence in Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) and Sara Kane’s Blasted (1995)” (2009). Last but not least, she has also published the book Beyond the Walls. Being with Each Other in Herman Melville’s Clarel (2015), dedicated exclusively to Clarel as a literary space analyzing the political potentiality of intersubjetivity for the creation of forms of togetherness that radically question traditionally dividing categorizations of both personal and communitarian identities. In 2011, she was awarded the Melville Society Archive Fellowship, which allowed her to enrich her research on the works of Herman Melville in New Bedford, MA.

Ana María Manzanas Calvo

is Full Professor of American Literature and Culture at University of Salamanca (Spain). Her publications include Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces, Bodies (Routledge 2017), Borders Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture: Social Movements, Occupation, and Empowerment (Routledge 2014), Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film (Routledge 2011), Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realism in US Ethnic Literatures (Rodopi 2009), and Intercultural Mediations: Mimesis and Hybridity in American Literatures (lit Verlag 2003), all of them coauthored with J. Benito. She has edited and coedited collections of essays, such as Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (Rodopi 2002), and Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line (Rodopi 2007). With J. Benito she is general editor of the Brill Series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature.”

Ángel Mateos-Aparicio

obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Ciudad Real, Spain), where he currently teaches as an Associate Professor. His main research interests focus on the intersection of science fiction, mainstream postmodern literature, and postmodern culture. Among his recent publications are the articles “Popularizing Postmodern Utopian Thinking in Science Fiction Film: Matrix, V for Vendetta, In Time and Verbo,” in María del Mar Ramón Torrijos and Eduardo de Gregorio-Godeo (eds.), Making Sense of Popular Culture (2017); “Perfect Cities, Permanent Hells: The Ideological Coordinates of Urban Space in Postmodern Science Fiction,” in David Walton y Juan Suárez (eds.), Borders, Networks, Escape Lines: Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space (2017), and “The Frontier Myth and Racial Politics,” in Masood Ashraf Raja, Jason W. Ellis and Swarapili Nandi (eds.), The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (2011).

Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain) where she teaches courses on English and American literature. Her main research interest is Chican@ Latin@ Literature with two specific focuses: The literary representation of the borderlands as lived and existential space, and, more recently, the testimonial, documentary, and auto ethnographic aspects of Chican@literature. She is a member of the state-funded research project “A Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach (I-V) mineco (2003-2019). Her publications include academic essays in journals such as Journal of American Studies, Melus, Aztlán, Signs, and Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, the monograph Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas (Rodopi 2003), and the edited volume Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature (Routledge 2015).

Patricia San José Rico

is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Valladolid. In 2013 she defended her thesis on the representation of trauma in contemporary African American literature, which has since become her main research interest. She has published several book chapters including “‘It’s Black, It’s White, It’s Hard for you to Get By’: Discourses of Race, Color, and Ugliness in Contemporary African-American Novels” in Discourses that Matter: Selected Essays on English and American Studies (Cambridge Scholars 2013); “The writer as translator: Langston Hughes and his transcultural racial interpretation of the Spanish Civil War” in Translation and Conflict—Narratives of the Spanish Civil War and the Dictatorship (Palgrave Macmillan 2019), and a monograph entitled Creating Memory and Cultural Identity in African American Trauma Fiction (Brill 2019).