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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. 

I have recently joined the team at the academic journal  parallax as an associate editor.

Peer-reviewed articles

Book reviews

Conference papers

  • ‘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.

Public engagement

Student education

  • Leading year 2 module: Writing Women in the Spanish Golden Age at Manchester University (2023 – 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).
  • 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