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Andrea Castro

Assistant Dean

Faculty of Humanities
Telephone
+46 31-786 17 99
+46 766-18 17 99
Mail
andrea.castro@sprak.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41255 Göteborg
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

Professor

Department of Languages and Literatures
Telephone
+46 31-786 17 99
+46 766-18 17 99
Mail
andrea.castro@sprak.gu.se
Visiting address
Renströmsgatan 6
41256 Göteborg
Room number
F423
Postal address
Box 200
40530 Göteborg

About Andrea Castro

I am a Professor of Spanish and, currently, the Assistant Dean for Research for the Faculty of Humanities.

Research

My focus of research is 19th century Latin American literature and culture. I was the project manager for the recently finished project Conservative Sensibilities: Literary imaginations and the press in nineteenth-century Latin America and I am involved in several international networks s focusing on 19th century Spanish literature and culture. Within the period, I am interested in the press, poetry, the novel, the fantastic and translation issues and how these give expression to, create or discuss conceptions, ideas and believes.

In contemporary literature, I have studied the relationships between language, memory and identity, 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.

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.

During 2021 and 2022, I was a member of the Swedish Research Council's review panel for Aesthetic disciplines.

Teaching

My teaching deals with literature and culture in Spanish and literary and cultural theory, and academic writing. I’m very interested in the role of literature in language instruction, but also as a cultural and transcultural source of knowledge. I also teach classes at other departments within Göteborgs universitet, I have taught at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and given lectures at a number of universities both in Sweden and abroad. I have co-edited the book Historia de las literaturas hispánicas. Aproximaciones críticas, published by Studentlitteratur in 2013.

I supervise doctoral students at third-cycle level. Six of these have defended their doctoral theses: Fredrik Olsson (2015), Sofía García Nespereira (2017), Eduardo Jiménez Tornatore (2018) and Gabriela Mercado (2019), Therese Svensson (2020), Emma Magnusson (2021). Currently I am assistant supervisor for Eugenia Arria (Lund University).

Outreach

I enjoy participating in public events involving literature in Spanish, and I organize events aimed at the interested public. 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].

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. You can also go find it in all podcast applications.