University of Gothenburg
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Andrea Castro

Professor

Department of Languages &
Literatures
Telephone
+46 31-786 17 99
Mail
andrea.castro@sprak.gu.se
Fax
+46 31-786 19 33
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41256 Göteborg
Room number
F423
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Andrea Castro

Teaching

I started teaching Spanish at the Department of Romance Languages as a doctoral student and have taught at all levels in the first, second and third cycles . And I teach within the fields I enjoy the most: fiction and literary theory. I also teach academic writing and supervise thesis work. I’m very interested in the role of fiction in language instruction, but also as a cultural and transcultural source of knowledge.

I also teach classes at the Department of Comparative literature and within the International Language Programme. I have taught a course at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and given lectures at a number of universities both in Sweden and abroad.

I have worked and continue to work a great deal with the opportunities offered by digital media in creating an interactive and flexible learning environment. However, after all these years I have come to realise that I prefer the on-campus seminar format, where people can meet physically and discuss topics face-to-face.

I have also worked to develop our thesis courses and have authored textbooks. I have for example co-edited the book Historia de las literaturas hispánicas. Aproximaciones críticas, published by Studentlitteratur in 2013.

I supervise doctoral students at third-cycle level, five of whom have defended their doctoral theses: Fredrik Olsson (2015), Sofía García Nespereira (2017), Eduardo Jiménez Tornatore (2018) and Gabriela Mercado (2019), Therese Svensson (2020). I am currently main supervisor for Emma Magnusson and assistant supervisor for Eugenia Arria (Lund University).

Research

From the genre of fantastic literature in Argentinian and Latin-American literature viewed from a comparative perspective, I have progressed to studying other literature from around the turn of the century in Argentina. I have for example taken an interest in literature by writers who immigrated to Argentina during this period as well as in translation problems. From 2008 to 2010, I received STINT’s (the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education) network grant for the project Intersection of Discourses and Repertoires in Fin de Siécle Latin America together with researchers from the University of Valencia (Spain), University of California Los Angeles (USA) and University of Buenos Aires and National University of La Pampa (Argentina). I’m involved in several international networks focusing on 19th century Spanish literature and culture.

I have also conducted research within literature didactics, focusing in particular on issues concerning how to read fiction and other texts/genres. In this context, I have participated in the research project Defamiliarization and Desautomatization. Approaches to Literature in Academic Teaching Situations, which in 2009 published an anthology with the same title.

I have studied the relationships between language, memory and identity in contemporary literature, particularly in the work of writer María Negroni. Within this field, I have co-edited the book De nómades y migrantes. Desplazamientos en la literatura, el cine y el arte hispanoamericanos, which was published in 2015 by Argentinian publisher Beatriz Viterbo.

Since 2015 I have returned to the 19th century, and from January 2019 onwards I have received funding from the Swedish Research Council, together with Kari Soriano Salkjelsvik from the University of Bergen, for the project Conservative Sensibilities: Literary imaginations and the press in nineteenth-century Latin America.

Since January 2019, I have been responsible for the Languages, Literature and Culture research area and for the seminar on transculturality studies.

Outreach

I enjoy participating in public events involving literature in Spanish. I have for example interviewed Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa (in English) [https://youtu.be/CsONeT0ILbI] and Claudia Piñeyro (in Spanish) [https://youtu.be/I5Ydc89EbUc].

In 2014, I was involved in the project Language for Education, funded by the Grundtvig Institute at the University of Gothenburg and coordinated by Magnus Pettersson Ängsal. A publication in Swedish was presented in 2015.

The podcast Poesía al paso was launched in May 2016 and is an outreach project I started with Azucena Castro, at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University. In the podcast, we read and discuss poetry in Spanish, sometimes with invited guests. Read about the project and find the episodes in the blog titled Poesía al paso. [https://poesiaalpasopodcast.wordpress.com/]. You can also go find it in all podcast applications.