Alvaro Gonzalez Montero

Profile

I am a PhD candidate at the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies, funded by 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 completed 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. Recently, in addition to my thesis, I have been working on a social history project about local LGBTQ+ resistance, tourism and protests in the Costa del Sol in the 1960s with Richard Cleminson. We have obtained LCS funding to research archives of Vagos y Maleantes and academic work on this topic is in progress, with an academic publication to appear in the near future, and a public dissemination one already published in CTXT.

I am an associate editor for the journal of theory and cultural studies parallax.

Peer-reviewed articles

• “Diary writing as a queer technology of the self: David Vilaseca and men’s desire”, Interalia (upcoming in December 2024).
• “The Illness That Dare Not Speak Its Name: HIV/AIDS in Gil de Biedma’s Diaries.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (2024) 25 (2): 261–77. doi:10.1080/14636204.2024.2347624.
• ‘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)

Public dissemination articles

González Montero, A. and Cleminson, R. 2024. "Revuelta mariquita en San Pedro de Alcántara", CTXT, 310.

Book reviews

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

Conference papers

• «La esquizofrenia quiere decir “nada”: Leopoldo María Panero, enfermedad y escritura autobiografica», conferencia Marginados y malditos en la literatura contemporánea, Astorga, 2024.
• “Queer ghosts: archaeology of a silence”, paper at the symposium Sexual Dissidence in Spanish History, University of Leeds, 2024.
• ‘Reinaldo Arenas and Jaime Gil de Biedma: AIDS in life-writing across the Atlantic’, annual conference for the Society of Latin American Studies, 2023.
• ‘Queering tuberculosis: Jaime Gil de Biedma and the antibourgeois illness’, International Conference on Medical Humanities, Birkbeck University of London, 2023
• ‘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.

Conferences

- Symposium  Sexual Dissidence in Spanish History, University of Leeds, 2024, organized with Richard Cleminson.

Public engagement

• Presentation: “A diary to precipitate events: sex and sexuality in David Vilaseca’s and Jaime Gil de Biedma’s diaries” at the 4^th Festival of Queer Literature in Spanish in London at the Instituto Cervantes (London).
• Leader of the Spanish Book Club at Instituto Cervantes Leeds (2020–2022)
• ‘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

• Leading year 2 module: Writing Women in the Spanish Golden Age at Manchester University (2022/23 – ongoing).
• 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)

Editorial positions

• Associate Editor at parallax – University of Leeds (2023 – ongoing).
• Proofreader and editor at Dos Bigotes, Spanish LGBTQ+ publisher house (Spain) – part of my Research Employability Project (April-July 2024)
• Translation editor at Nottingham University LTS Journal (2021)

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