Alberto Andrés Calvo

Profile

I joined the School of English as a PhD student in 2024, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WRoCAH). I graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid with a degree in English in 2016, and from the University of Manchester with an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Literature in 2018. I am a member of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

My PhD project, “Attention Crisis: The Contemporary Stream-of-Consciousness Novel in the Attention Economy”, focuses on the contemporary stream-of-consciousness novel, with Jon Fosse, Lucy Ellmann, Mike McCormack, Rebecca Watson, Anna Burns, and Eimear McBride as case studies. I link novels by these authors and their critical and commercial reception with a burgeoning discourse on the decline of the human capacity for attention in what has been called “the attention economy” – an economic model reliant on the production and transaction of particular types of attention.

For the academic year 2024/2025, I am one of the co-directors of Quilting Points, an interdisciplinary critical reading group encompassing several schools at the University.

I am also an aspiring literary translator (English into Spanish and Spanish into English). I have been mentored by the translator and novelist Jen Calleja, and, in October 2024, I completed a year-long Penguin Random House English-into-Spanish literary translation course.

Research interests

I work on the twentieth and twenty-first century novel, with a special focus on the narrative rendering of attention and distraction. I am particularly interested in literary and cultural responses to the attention economy, including the contemporary resonance of “slow” art, literature, music, and cinema. However, my research interests also include the following:

· The stream-of-consciousness novel and its transnational history

· “Long” and “difficult” forms of literature, and their critical and readerly reception

· The Internet novel as historical artefact

· The cultural legacies of modernist literature, particularly the modernist poetics of Scott Walker’s later work

· The contemporary literary marketplace and award system

· Hauntology and broader questions around cultural nostalgia

· The periodisation of literature after postmodernism

Qualifications

• M.A. Modern and Contemporary Literature, The University of Manchester (2018)
• M.A. English Literature, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (2017)
• B.A. English: Literature and Linguistics, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (2016)