Romero

Benjamín Romero Salado

PhD Candidate

Education

Ph.D., Spanish, University of Virginia (expected 2021)
M.A., Spanish, University of Delaware (2016)
M.A., Teaching of Secondary School Education and Languages Teaching, Universidad de Sevilla (2013)
B.A., English Philology, Universidad de Sevilla (2012)

Research Interests

  • Writer-artists of 20th-century Spain
  • Collage
  • Identity
  • Multimodality and intermediality
  • Materiality and ephemera

Dissertation

"Self-Fashioning the Writer-Artist: Carmen Martín Gaite's Identity Constructions through Collage" explores how Carmen Martín Gaite makes use of the poetics of collage as a self-fashioning technique (Greenblatt). My dissertation traces how collage inaugurates a "metalanguage of the visual" (Krauss) and I equate this self-reflexivity to similiar identity formation processes. The self as a collage-like construct (Drag) operates under the economies of juxtaposing heterogeneous, fragmentary, and often contradictory components that disrupt the chronologies and linear readability of written language. The appropriation of ready-mades confers the author with an intersubjective network to portray herself at different points of her career from the scarcities of the postwar period to her widespread popularity after the Spanish Transition to democracy. The scope of my project aims to continue discussing the dual role of the writer-artist and alternative methdologies to situate the presence of the static image in Iberian Studies. 

Teaching

  • Accelerated Elementary Spanish (University of Virginia Summer Session 2020)

  • Texts and Interpretations (University of Virginia 2019-2020)

  • Intermediate and Advanced Spanish (University of Virginia J-Term 2020)

  • Intermediate and Advanced Spanish (University of Virginia in Valencia Summer 2018)

  • Advanced Spanish (University of Virginia Summer 2017)

  • Intermediate and Advanced Spanish (University of Virginia 2016-2018)

  • Lower-Intermediate Spanish (University of Delaware 2014-2016)

Publications

  • "Objetos animados y personas objeto: un acercamiento posthumano a 'Las Hortensias' de Felisberto Hernández". Hispania (Forthcoming).
  • “Cuentos visuales: irrealidad, transposición de medios y límites interpretativos en Painting BorgesMIFLC Review, vol. 19, 2018-2019, pp. 151 - 174.

Presentations

"Intersubjectivity and Self-Fashioning through Collage in Carmen Martín Gaite's Visión de Nueva York." Collage and Montage in Literature and the Other Arts. ACLA Conference 2020, March 19 - 22 (2020) (Cancelled)

“Self-Portraits in the City: Constructing Identity through Collage in Visión de Nueva York by Carmen Martín Gaite.” Beyond Identity?: New Avenues for Interdisciplinary Research on Identity, Academia Europaea, Wrocław Knowledge Hub, November 8-9 (2019)

“Cuentos visuales: irrealidad, transposición de medios y límites interpretativos en Painting Borges.” Mountain Interstate Foreign Language Conference, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, October 4-6 (2018)

“History, Journaling and Self-Fashioning through Collage in Carmen Martín Gaite.” Institute for Humanities and Global Culture: Inflammatory Objects: What We Keep and Why, University of Virginia, April 13 (2018)

“'Like a carnaval': Visuality and the Carnivalesque in “Ustedes serán muy felices” by Manuel Rivas.” 24th Annual Carolina Conference on Romance Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, April 5-7 (2018)

“La mora cristiana: un recorrido visual a través de la caracterización ambigua de Zoraida.” Graduate Student Lecture Series, University of Virginia, December 2 (2016)

Grants & Awards

Charles Gordon Reid, Jr. Fellowship, Valladolid (Summer 2019)

Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation Award for the Summer School Global Studies and Critical Theory, University of Bologna, Summer 2018.

Sigma Delta Pi Award for the Best Graduate Student Essay, University of Delaware, 2016.

Spanish Graduate Student Award for Outstanding Academic Achievement, University of Delaware, 2016.

Erasmus Programme, Lessius Hogeschool, Antwerp, 2010-2011.