Neus Penalba

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Neus Penalba headshot

Contact

Phone 610-526-5080
Location Old Library 144

Department/Subdepartment

Education

Ph.D. Univeristy of Girona, Spain
M.A. Université Denis Diderot-Paris VII, France
B.A. University of Bacelona, Spain

Areas of Focus

20th-century literature, Comparative Literature, Environmental Humanities, Film Studies. 

Biography

My research interests include Contemporary Iberian Fiction and Film, viewed through the lens of Environmental Humanities. I am especially interested in how different cultural traditions intersect and find commonalities among similar or shared questions on topics like identity or society’s connection to nature. I explore these interrogations through various disciplines and methodologies, from Comparative Literature to Cultural Anthropology and Film Studies to Art History. I have put into practice this multidisciplinary approach in my first book, in which I examined the aesthetic elements of major Catalan novelist Mercè Rodoreda’s posthumous work, using European 20th-century ethnofiction (literature and cinema) and the pictorial primitivism of the avant-garde. I am working on the English version of my book , which was honored with the most prestigious prize for an essay written in Catalan –. Since its publication last April, my book has received significant .

My new project investigates the imaginaries of extinction in contemporary Iberian literature, analyzing how the representations of ecosystems and cultural loss are interlaced in the works of many Spanish, Catalan, and Galician authors.