List of members

 

Associate Members

External Collaborators

Profiles

Professors

John London

Professor John London works in the fields of Catalan theatre, art, poetry and translation studies. Among his publications are Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre (1997) and Contextos de Joan Brossa (2010) which was awarded the Serra d’Or prize for Catalan Studies. With David George he has edited Contemporary Catalan Theatre (1996) and Modern Catalan Plays (2000). John has also translated more than thirty plays, several of which have received productions in the UK, the USA and Australia.

Úrsula Vacalebri

Úrsula is currently finishing her PhD thesis on the expression of abstraction in Catalan, Spanish, and Italian from a cognitive perspective. She has extensive teaching experience, having worked as a Catalan language lector and Spanish teacher at the Universities of Turin, Milan, and Naples. She holds a degree in Catalan Philology from the University of Alicante and a Master’s in Teaching Catalan as a Second Language from the University of Girona.

Úrsula will be teaching Catalan Language courses and serving as an administrator at our centre, contributing to the management and development of our activities. She is passionate about languages, syntax, foreign language teaching, writing, politics and football.

PhD students

Charlotte Byrne

Her interdisciplinary PhD project is a historical novel exploring the experiences of queer Catalan women during the Spanish Civil War and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship. Working in a practice as research mode, she is adapting narrative patterns present in feminist Catalan historical novels such as Rodoreda’s La plaça del diamant and Barbal’s Pedra de tartera, among others. The novel also draws upon contemporary accounts of the time, as well as theories of trauma and postmemory, and aims to give a voice to those silenced under fascism and create a bridge between Anglophone and Catalan fiction and cultures.

Beth Caygill

Beth Caygill is currently investigating the role of translation in exploring feminist aspects of texts, with a view to creating a genealogy of twentieth-century Catalan women’s poetry. Her main interests are translation theory, the representation and aesthetic of gender in text, and intersemiotic translation.

After completing a BA in Modern Languages and Music at the University of Birmingham, she turned her attention to contemporary Catalan women poets and has produced translations for Metamorphoses and for academic texts.

She is an associate of the Stephen Spender Trust, an organisation that promotes poetry in translation through an annual competition and workshops for primary and secondary school children. Her research is funded by the Balearic Islands Doctoral Scholarship, in partnership with the Institut Ramon Llull.