Professor Helena Miguelez-Carballeira

Professor in Hispanic Studies

Contact info

Position: Professor in Hispanic Studies

Email: h.m.carballeira@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: 01248 382041 (2041 internal)

Location: Ystafell/ Room 451

Prif Adeilad y Celfyddydau | Main Arts Building

Prifysgol Bangor | Bangor University

Fford y Coleg, Bangor. LL57 2DG

Overview

I am Professor in Hispanic Studies at Bangor University where I have taught since 2005. I have a BA in English Studies from the University of Vigo (Premio Extraordinario Fin de Carreira, 2000), an MSc in Translation Studies from The University of Edinburgh (2002) and a PhD in Hispanic Studies from The University of Edinburgh (2005).

I have published extensively on post-1850 Iberian cultures and Translation Studies. My first monograph on the history of the trope of Galician Celtic sentimentality (Galicia, a Sentimental Nation: Gender, Culture, Politics) came out with University of Wales Press in 2013, was translated into Galician-Portuguese in 2014 (Através Editora) and received the 2015 Award for Best Essay in Galician by the Association of Writers in Galician (AELG). I co-edited the Special Issue ‘Critical Approaches to the Nation in Galician Studies’ (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies) with Kirsty Hooper in 2009 and ‘Translation in Wales: History, Theory and Approaches’ (Translation Studies) with Angharad Price and Judith Kaufmann in 2016. I edited the collection A Companion to Galician Culture for Tamesis in 2014. Among other current projects, I am writing a monograph on the different discourses of coloniality in Spain (Contested Colonialities in the Long Spanish Twentieth Century: Empire, Nation Independence; under contract with Palgrave), preparing an edited collection on postcolonial approaches to contemporary Spanish culture (following the organisation of the international conference ‘Postcolonial Spain? Contexts, Politics, Cultural Practices’, Bangor University, 2017), and writing a Galician-language book on cultural reactions to environmental violence in present-day Galicia. Since 2006 I have been Director of the Centre for Galician Studies in Wales, a world-leading research-led centre in its field supported by a permanent grant by the Xunta de Galicia Government. Current and previous research grant awards include the Dorothy Sherman-Severin Scholarship (2006), AHRC Research Network (Translation in Wales project, 2012), AHRC Fellowship (Gender and Galician National Identity project, 2013), a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (Postcolonial Spain project, 2015–2016) and an OWRI Flexible Funding Award (MEITS, University of Cambridge, 2019-2020).

I was founding co-editor of Galicia 21: Journal of Contemporary Galician Studies (2009-2014) and regularly review proposals and manuscripts for subject journals and publishers including Liverpool University Press, Palgrave and Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, University of Wales Press and Punctum (Catalonia). I have been a member of the selection panel for the Manuel Murguía national essay award (Deputación d’A Coruña, 2017) and serve on the AHRC Peer Review College since 2017. I am external examiner for the MSc in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh (2017–2020) and have been external examiner for PhD and MA by Research theses at the University of Warwick, Oxford, Exeter, Vigo, Auckland, Santiago de Compostela, Vic and the University of the Basque Country.

I have been invited to present my research as keynote speaker at public and academic events, including the Asociación Internacional de Estudos Galegos triannual conference (Buenos Aires, 2015), the Semana da Filosofía (Pontevedra, 2016), the Forum for Iberian Studies (Oxford, 2016) and the Basque Fellowship Conference at St Antony’s College (Oxford, 2016) and the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo (Santiago de Compostela, 2017), Cambridge University (2019) and Lund University (2019). In March 2018 I was invited to deliver the postgraduate course ‘Elegías sin consuelo: Poéticas del territorio, lengua y conflicto en la cultura gallega contemporánea’ at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. In the period after the Catalan Referendum on self-determination, held on the 1 October 2017, I was a regular commentator on BBC Wales and BBC World Service.   

In Bangor, I have served as Director of Research for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures (2014-2018) and as Director of POstgraduate Research for the College of Arts, Humanities and Business (2016-2020). 

 

Research

I approach the study of present-day politics and cultures in Spain, including the cultures of Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country, as marked by enduring post-imperial tensions. Placing forms of material and symbolic violence at the core of such approach, providing nuanced national contextualisation and interrogating multiculturalist approaches to post-Francoist Spain, my work has provided novel understandings of a range of themes: the historical formation of national identity discourses (Galicia, a Sentimental Nation, 2013), the dynamics of competitive masculinities in nationalisms ("The Imperial within", 2017), or the cultural representation of the legacies of violence in the Basque Country after ETA ("Poetics of Post-ETA Spain", 2017).

My work has interrogated the canon (for example, by offering new ways of reading and teaching Rosalía de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán and José Ortega y Gasset) as well as engaging with little-studied contexts and practices (musical satire in Galicia, torture testimonials and ephemeral exhibitions in the Basque Country). Since my doctoral studies, I have remained an active researcher in the field of Translation Studies, with a particular interest in gender and non-state nations. In this area, I have published on the English translations of Catalan writer Mercé Rodoreda’s classic La plaça del Diamant, have translated Galician poet María do Cebreiro into English (I am not from here) and have led a pioneering research project on translation in Wales, culminating in the Special Issue ‘Translation in Wales: History Theory and Approaches’ of the journal Translation Studies.  
Following from the award of a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2015–2016), my current research seeks to transform understandings of national conflict in Spain by applying postcolonial theories. In particular, it innovatively engages forms of postcolonial enquiry (independence, perpetrator studies, testimonial life narratives, migrant connectivity practices, post-conflict reconciliation, para-colonial aesthetics, orientalisms) with a critique of imperial reason in late nineteenth-, twentieth-century and contemporary Spain. I am currently preparing two publications as part of this research strand: a monograph, Contested Colonialities in the Long Spanish Twentieth-Century: Empire, Nation, Independence (under contract with Palgrave), which connects the ongoing inflections of Spain’s internal national conflict with the legacies of imperial violence inscribed in Spanish democratic modernity; and an edited volume with selected studies following from the organisation of the international conference ‘Postcolonial Spain? Contexts, Politics and Cultural Practices’ (Bangor, 2017).

I am also currently developing new research on how contemporary Galician culture has registered the disappearance of autochthonous rural life in the last three decades, combining my long-standing interests in postcolonial theory with aspects of ecocriticism, trauma and animal studies. This strand of my current research forms the basis of my graduate seminar ‘Elegies without consolation: poetics of territory and conflict in contemporary Galician Culture’, which I delivered at The Graduate Center of CUNY (2018).

Central to my approach is collaborating regularly with other researchers, cultural practitioners, politicians and social movements. Examples of recent and current collaborations include:

  • Organiser and speaker, with Hywel Wiliams (MP, Plaid Cymru, Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Catalonia), of the event ‘Understanding independence in contemporary Spain: notes on the Catalan referendum’, Bangor, 27 October 2017.
  • Collaboration with Catalan feminist direct action group ‘Gatamaula’ for the publication of multi-authored volume Terra de Ningú: Perspectives feministes sobre la independència (2017).
  • Participation in research network ‘Contested Identities: Cultural Dialogues between Small Nations’ (led by Professor Willy Maley, University of Glasgow, funded by The Royal Society of Edinburgh, 2015–2017).
  • Participation in research network ‘La experiencia de la sociedad moderna en España: Emociones, relaciones de género y subjetividades (siglos XIX y XX)’ (led by Professor Nerea Aresti, University of the Basque Country, funded by the Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad, Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, 2017–2019).
  • Participation in research network ‘Unha análise da obra narrativa de Rosalía de Castro: Fundamentos teóricos e metodolóxicos’ (led by Dr María do Cebreiro Rábade Villar, University of Santiago de Compostela, funded by the Xunta de Galicia Government, 2010–2012).

Teaching and Supervision

Year 1

  • Hispanic Studies component of LXE1600 Transnational Cultures and LXE1700 History in Context

Year 2

  • Spanish Language: Grammar Component of LZS2020 and LZS2040.

Year 4

  • Adaptations in Hispanic Cinema as part of the module LXI3011 Adaptations in European Cinema
  • Spanish Language: Translation and Advanced Grammar component of LZS3020/30/40
  • Spanish UG Dissertation Supervisor

MA

  • Programme Lead for MA in Translation Studies
  • Elements of Academic Writing as part of the module LXM Research Methods

PhD Supervision

My previous PhD students include:

  • Tegau Andrews (awarded 2011): ‘Websites and the Translation of Minority Languages: A Case Study in the Welsh Context’
  • David Miranda-Barreiro (awarded 2012): ‘Gender, Nation and Otherness in Spanish New York Narratives’. Awarded AHGBI Best Thesis 2012.
  • Adam Pearce (awarded 2014): ‘Translating the Welsh Canon: The Translations of Daniel Owen’s Novels into English’
  • Maria Cristina Seccia (awarded 2014): ‘Italo-Canadian Writing and Cultural Translation: Translating Caterina Edwards’ The Lion’s Mouth into Italian’
  • Jinquan Yu (awarded 2019): ‘Dylan Thomas in Chinese translation: a sociological analysis’
  • Lorena López-López (awarded 2019): 'Dialogando coas marxes na narrativa malega de autoría feminina'
  • Antigoni Bazani (awarded 2019): 'Translation and L2 Teaching: Tracing an Invisible Relationship in the Monolingual and Post-Monolingual Teaching Context'

I currently supervise or co-supervise the following PhD theses in a variety of disciplines:

  • Belén Iglesias-Arbor: ‘Translating the Spanish Best-Seller: María Dueñas, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Carlos Ruiz Zafón’
  • Changjing Liu (as co-supervisor): ‘Chinese avant-garde fiction in translation’
  • Yujuan Zhou (as co-supervisor): ‘An analysis of place in David Hawkes’ translations of The Story of the Stone
  • Chunli Shen (as co-supervisor): ‘Translating the novels of Yan Lianke into English’

Contact Info

Position: Professor in Hispanic Studies

Email: h.m.carballeira@bangor.ac.uk

Phone: 01248 382041 (2041 internal)

Location: Ystafell/ Room 451

Prif Adeilad y Celfyddydau | Main Arts Building

Prifysgol Bangor | Bangor University

Fford y Coleg, Bangor. LL57 2DG

Grant Awards and Projects

  • The Translations of T. Ifor Rees: Approaching Welsh-Hispanic Cultural Relations in the 2th-Century (MEITS University of Cambridge/AHRC Open World Research Initiative, 2019-2020).
  • Towards a Postcolonial Spain: History, Political Cultures and Material Realities (British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, 2015-2016)
  • Gender and Nation in Galicia: A Cultural History (AHRC Research Fellowship, 2012-2013)
  • Translation in Non-States Cultures: perspectives from Wales (AHRC "Translating Cultures" Research Network, 2012)
  • Centre for Galician Studies - Partnership Agreement for the Teaching and Promotion of the Galician Language, Literature and Culture (2006-present).

Research outputs (42)

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Prof. activities and awards (82)

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Accolades (3)

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