Alvaro Gonzalez Montero

Profile

I am a PhD candidate at the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, funded my UKRI through WRoCAH. The provisional title of my thesis is: Illness and queerness in Spain: Spanish life-writing from 1936 to the present, under the supervision of Prof. Richard Cleminson and Prof. Duncan Wheeler. 

I studied a degree in Translation and Interpreting (English, French and Arabic) at the University of Malaga, Spain, in 2013. Afterwards I did an MA in Education at the University of Malaga in 2014. 

I completed my MA by Research with a Distinction at the University of Leeds (2022) with a dissertation titled Jaime Gil de Biedma's literary diaries: queerness, colonialism and illness in Franco’s Spain and beyond (1956–1985), under the supervision of Prof. Richard Cleminson and Prof. Duncan Wheeler. 

My research interests range from literature in general to cultural studies and critical theory, but they all share a preoccupation for the articulations of marginalised identities through writing. 

Peer-reviewed articles

• ‘A fundamental feeling of strangeness: movement, cosmopolitanism and colonialism in Jaime Gil de Biedma’s diaries’, WRoCAH Journal, 7 (2022). 
• ‘The Camp and the Dandy: Class, Sexuality, and Desire in Gil de Biedma’s Diaries’, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, 16 (2021) 

Book reviews

• ‘How to Read a Diary: Critical Contexts and Interpretive Strategies for 21st-Century Readers’, Life Writing, 19 (2022)

Conference papers

• ‘The Camp and the Dandy: Class, Sexuality, and Desire in Gil de Biedma’s Diaries’, AHGBI Annual Conference, April 2022.
• ‘A fundamental feeling of strangeness: movement, cosmopolitanism and colonialism in Jaime Gil de Biedma’s diaries’, MIDEX Seminars, February 2022.

Public engagement

• Leader of the Spanish Book Club at Instituto Cervantes Leeds (2020–ongoing)
• ‘In Conversation with Eduardo Mendicutti’, Instituto Cervantes, 2021 
• ‘Los diarios de Jaime Gil de Biedma con Álvaro González y Andreu Jaume’, Instituto Cervantes, 2020 

Student education

• Delivering seminars for the module Practical Language Skills in Spanish 1 (2022–ongoing)
• Planning and delivering workshops for the module Researching Spanish and Latin American Studies (2022–ongoing)
• Teacher of Spanish language at Instituto Cervantes Leeds to levels B2 to C1 (2021–2022)
• Teacher of Spanish and French at the Grammar School at Leeds, from year 7 to A-Level (2017–2021)

External positions

• Translation editor at Nottingham University LTS Journal

Research interests

My research interests include:

• Spanish life-writing: diaries, autobiographies, memoirs, correspondence
• queer studies
• medical humanities: illness and stigma
• colonialism and postcolonialism in Hispanic and Portuguese contemporary literature
• psychoanalytic approaches to literature.
• Catalan literature
• Portuguese literature
• Comparative literature
• translation studies: queer translation, feminism and translation, poetry
• second language acquisition and pedagogy

Qualifications

• BA Translation and Interpreting (English, French, Arabic). Uni. Malaga, Spain. (2008-2013)
• Master's in Education (Spanish teacher training) Uni Malaga 2013-2014
• MA by Research in Spanish literature. 2019-2022University of Leeds.

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for World Literatures