Alexis Grohmann

Professor of Contemporary Spanish Literature

  • Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
  • Department of European Languages and Cultures
  • School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 3.19
50 George Square

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9LH

Availability

  • Horas de atención al alumnado (durante las semanas lectivas):

    Lunes, 12.00-16.00.

Biography

Background

Alexis Grohmann was born in Thessaloniki (Greece), where he was educated at the Deutsche Schule. He gained a BA Hons. in Film & Media Studies and Spanish from the University of Stirling, a MA in Critical and Cultural Theory from the University of Wales, College of Cardiff, and a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Edinburgh with the help of a Faculty of Arts Studentship, having begun his PhD studies at the University of Cambridge, where he held a Gibson Spanish Scholarship. He has been a lecturer in Spanish (and Head of Department) at the University of St Andrews and a lecturer in Modern Peninsular Literature and Culture at Stirling. He has also worked as a Research Assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of over 120 publications in the fields of contemporary Spanish and European literatures, including the first full-length study of the novels of Javier Marías, Coming into one's Own: The Novelistic Development of Javier Marías, as well as other books on Marías, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, digression in European literature or the Spanish newspaper column. He has been visiting professor and been invited to speak at, and collaborate with, a number of universities internationally (in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy or Latin America) and in the UK and Ireland. He has acted as external examiner at more than twenty institutions in the UK and Europe. He has given keynote addresses and speeches at the invitation of the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Spanish Ministry of Education, the Hay Festival, the Cervantes Institute or the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo and the Fundación Santillana. Many of his activities have been reported in the mainstream press and media in Spain, the UK and beyond, and he has been interviewed by or has collaborated with newspapers and media such as the New York Times Magazine, Radio y Televisión Española, Euronews, EL PAÍS, Cadena Ser,  ABC, The Guardian, THES, the BBC, or ZDF and ÖRF. He has done consultancy work for the BBC (Hard Talk Extra) and the German publisher S. Fischer, amongst others, and produced commissioned work for other major publishers, including Penguin, Vintage/Knopf and Círculo de Lectores /Galaxia Gutenberg and Ínsula. Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas. He is a peer assessor for numerous academic journals and has acted as a specialist assessor for the National University of Ireland, The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences or the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium). He is a member of the Scottish Qualifications Authority, National Qualifications Support Team for Modern Languages. Many of his projects have been funded by external bodies, including the AHRC, the British Academy and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Since 2008 he has been given an entry in Who’s Who in the World (Marquis, US). His most recent publications include Between Eternities, a commissioned edition of essays by Javier Marías for Penguin Books, Las reglas del juego de Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a book-length study of the novels of Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte (now in its third edition), Javier Marías: 50 años de literatura (1971-2021). Nuevas visiones (with Santiago Bertrán), and a survey of Spanish literature from 1989 to the present day for a recent history of European literatures, Lettres européennes. Histoire de la littérature européenne. In 2020 he formed part of the jury of the Premio Formentor de las Letras. 

Catedrático Cervantes/Cervantes Professor, Instituto Cervantes & University of Edinburgh (https://www.ed.ac.uk/global/partnerships/strategic-partnerships/partnership-with-the-cervantes-institute)

Director, Cátedra Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Universidad de Murcia.

Elected corresponding member / académico correspondiente extranjero,  Real Academia Española

Columnist, The Objective (https://theobjective.com/autor/alexis-grohmann/)

Undergraduate teaching

  • Spanish language, all levels
  • 19th-century Spanish literature
  • 20th-century and 21st-century Spanish (and Latin American) literature 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research summary

Alexis Grohmann has written widely on the work of Javier Marías and Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the Spanish newspaper column by writers and other contemporary, post-1970 Spanish writers and narratives. He has just completed a monographic study of the novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte (Las reglas del juego de Arturo Pérez-Reverte) and has edited a book of essays by Javier Marías entitled Between Eternities for Penguin Books and Vintage (USA), translated by Margaret Jull-Costa. He has supervised students on various topics at MA, MSc and PhD level, ranging from the critical theories and philosophy of María Zambrano, Jesús Aguirre, José Aranguren, Ortega y Gasset or Julián Marías, the Spanish and Anglo-American campus novel, the literature of Javier Marías to the fairy tales of Carmen Martín-Gaite.

He is happy to supervise postgraduate work in many areas of 20th- and 21st-century Spanish literature and culture.

View all 102 publications on Research Explorer

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