Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Poetics

Room: Arts 1.34
Tel: 020-7882-8302
e-mail: o.a.garcia@qmul.ac.uk

Professor García is an academic, a published poet and a human rights’ activist. He is a Senator of the Diplomatic Council, of the London Diplomatic Academy, since 2000.

Teaching

Professor García has been teaching at Queen Mary since 1992. His teaching focuses on Modern Peninsular Studies (mainly poetry and drama), Latin American literature and film (particularly Cuban studies) and Comparative Poetry and Poetics (international).

At the moment, his teaching at Queen Mary at any one time involves a selection from the following:

─Poetry and Poetics of Resistance (international)
─The Canon and Marginality: The Effects of Censorship and Exile in Contemporary Spanish Poetry and Drama, and in Cuban poetry.
─The Canon and Marginality: Twentieth Century Spanish Theatre.
─Federico García Lorca: Poetry and Drama.
─Cuban Poetry & Fiction Post-1980.
─Cuban Society Through Film: Post-1959 Revolution.
─Development of the Modern Short Story in Latin America.
─Communication & Discovery: Debates on Late-Nineteenth & Twentieth Century Hispanic Poetry.
─Spanish Romanticism & Philosophy.

Other undergraduate teaching in team-taught courses has involved: Transculturation, popular and mass culture; Innovation and Experiment in Modern European Drama; Avant-Garde Poetry, Literary Responses to the Spanish Civil War; Spanish Romanticism; Spanish Contemporary Drama and Spanish Contemporary Poetry.

Postgraduate courses in which he has taught:

• MA in Modern European Languages, Literatures & Culture. Theory Core Course. Field: Postcolonial theory
• MA in Modern European Languages, Literatures & Thought. Lyric Option: futurism, surrealism, philosophy, and theory in twentieth century Spanish poetry (in the light of Italian futurism and French surrealism)
• MA in Hispanic Studies (Intercollegiate, 1993-1999): Canon and Marginality
• MA in Cultural Memory (Intercollegiate)- Imposed memory and the State in Cuba & Spain.

Research

Professor García’s research focus is on the area of studies concerning Poetics of Exile, Censorship and Cultural Resistance, which he explores across genres (narrative, poetry, film, drama and performance), as his publications to date show. Although he started out with a solid training in the field of Hispanic Studies (with one PhD in Spanish drama and one in poetry), with minors at doctoral level in German drama in exile, in translation, and French and Italian literature at undergraduate level, he has expanded his field of research to include a more comparative perspective. His interest is directed by wider global issues of exile, censorship and cultural manifestations of resistance, an area which fits in with new developments in the field of comparative studies. Lately, his research has included community theatre in Rio de Janeiro, Cuba, Nicaragua and the Philippines. He is also interested in cultural production in the Saharawi camps in Southwestern Algeria. He believes this transnational perspective has widened his understanding of censorship and exile, and the cultural responses of creative work produced under duress. He seeks in his research and writing to look beyond the confinements of metaphors of right and left wing political stances in order to fully understand the work of censors and States and their impact on the political subjectivities he studies. He has devoted special attention to censorship and drama production during Franco’s regime in Spain (and shortly thereafter) and has published 3 books in this area of research.
He is also interested in Cuban film and representations of Cuban society post 1959 in Cuban and foreign films. At the moment, part of this research has been published in his book on Cultural Cyclothymia, but limited to the films Amigos and The Pérez Family, produced in the USA. His other book projects include a book on women playwrights in Spain (either officially censored or ignored by the ‘Canon’) and a book on poetics of resistance.
His main areas of research have focused on Cuban studies (particular interest in exile); modern Spanish poetry and drama and cultural memory: language, literature and the state in Latin America and Spain.
His own international standing as a poet and his creative output are in line with the conceptual interests of his research, as particularly explored in his latest title Resistencia en la tierra (Madrid: Verbum, 2007).
 
Professor García is a member of the editorial boards of the Hispanic Research Journal and Voces del Caribe, and the new series editor of Dialogues with Censorship (international).

Publications

Publications related to research and scholarship

Books (authored)

• El (im)posibilismo teatral: Buero y Sastre frente a la censura. Series: Diálogos con la censura, vol. 1. Miami: CERA [Censorship & Exile Research Association], 2006.
•  Censura y enfrentamiento con el público: El teatro de Lauro Olmo y Martín Recuerda. Series: Diálogos con la censura, vol. 2. Miami: CERA, 2006.
•  Cultural Cyclothymia in the Face of Dystocia: (De)constructing a National Identity in Exile. The Cuban Case. Miami: CERA, 2006.
•  Velázquez ante el espejo: La función heurística en Las meninas de Buero Vallejo. Diálogos con la censura, vol. 3. Miami: CERA, 2007.

Book (edited with introduction):

• El Güegüense al pie de Bobadilla: Poemas escogidos de la poesía nicaragüense actual. Managua: PAVSA, 2007.  Co-edited and written with Nicaraguan poet and academic Dr Conny Palacios.

Poetry books (authored):

• Rumba incesante hacia la nada. American Literary Press, Owings Mill, Maryland, 1993.
• Pastor del tiempo. Cabildo Insular de Gran Canaria, Las Palmas, Spain, 1996. (Short-listed for the Tomás Morales International Poetry Prize).
• Topografía de otro espacio, London: CUB, 1999. Winner of the 1999 Lezama Lima International Poetry Prize.
• La fragmentación del paisaje, London: CUB, 1999. (Short-listed in France for the Antonio Machado International Poetry Prize).
• Resistencia en la tierra, Madrid: Verbum, 2007.

Other selected publications:

Book chapter (authored):

• ‘Mística y religión en la poesía cubana de hoy: Los siete círculos ─ trayectoria poética’, in Siete ensayos sobre la poesía de Amando Fernández, comp. Grisel Pujalá (Miami: La Torre de Papel, 1996), pp. 19-30.
  

Articles in refereed journals

• ‘Discurso social y fantasmagórico en la narrativa nicaragüense de los 90: En carne viva de Conny Palacios’, El Pez y la Serpiente: Revista Centroamericana de Cultura, no. 32, Nov-Dec 1999, pp. 83-101. [Nicaragua].
• ‘Hacia una poética fractal: Percepción fractal de Conny Palacios’, Intersedes (Revista de las Sedes Regionales de la Universidad de Costa Rica), 4.6 (2003), pp. 221-26.
• ‘The role of memory in (dis)locating the city: negotiating the articulation of national identity under censorship. Arrabal’s El arquitecto y el emperador de Asiria’, in From La Mancha to New Norcia. Images of Identity in Old and New Worlds, ed. Prof. Roy C. Boland Oseguera and Michael Gamarra, Antípodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, vol. XVI, 2005, pp. 81-98.
  

Conference contributions (refereed papers)

• ‘De España a América: influencia ideológica de Unamuno y Ortega en los intelectuales cubanos de la década de 1920 a 1930’ in Actas XXIX Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, ed. Joaquín Marco, Tome II, Vol. 2, Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1994, pp. 681-86.
• ‘Perspectivas transnacionales: Poéticas de resistencia en la creación de una identidad en exilio. La poesía de Reinaldo Arenas, Choman Hardi y Mahmud Darwish’, CD ROM: Lugares dos discursos (Rio de Janeiro: ABRALIC, Associação Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, 2006). ISBN: 978-85-98402-04-8.

Prospective research students:

Professor García welcomes proposals in any area of contemporary Spanish or Latin American Poetry, as well as comparative poetry and poetics (international) that deal with issues of exile, censorship and cultural resistance. He also welcomes proposals from prospective students interested in Cuban, Cuban-American studies (including film) and contemporary Spanish drama. He is particularly interested in research dealing with cultural production under duress.

Professor García has supervised or co-supervised PhD theses in the following areas:

Cuban-American literature written in English, Cuban novelists, poets, dramatists, Cuban film, contemporary peninsular poetry and drama.

• His most recent research supervision (as first or second supervisor) includes:
  PhD, Annabel Cox, ‘Cuban-American Literature of the One Point Generation: Migration and Cultural Identity’, Draper’s Award & AHRC funded. PhD awarded in 2006.
  
• PhD, Ángela Dorado Otero, ‘Dialogic Aspects in the Cuban Novel after the 1959 Revolution’
  
• PhD, Anna Hillman, ‘Polyphonic Voices in Monologic States: Laughter as a Weapon for Revolutionary Renewal in Cuban and Soviet Films between 1961 and 2000’. Co-supervised with Dr. Jeremy Hicks, Russian Dept.
  
• PhD, Simon Breden, ‘Beyond the Playwright: The Creative Process of Els Joglars and Teatro de la Abadía’ (co-supervised with Prof. Maria Delgado, Drama Dept.).
  
• PhD, Katharine Ruth Eaton, ‘The Translator as Visible Participant: Preparing the plays of Virgilio Piñera for Performance’ (co-supervised with Prof. Maria Delgado, Drama Dept.). AHRC funded.

Second supervisor for:

• PhD,    Noelia Díaz Vicedo, on Catalan women poets (co-supervised with Professor Parvati Nair)
• PhD,    Pilar Cáceres, on the poetry of Félix Grande (co-supervised with Professor Trevor Dadson)

Professor García has also supervised research on Cuban novelists Guillermo Rosales, Reinaldo Arenas, Carlos Victoria, and Cuban poet Rita Geada; twentieth-century Spanish poetry and women dramatists; and co-supervised research on Catalan and Spanish women novelists and Catalan poets, and comparative Caribbean literature.

 

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