Professor Philip Swanson

Head of Department
Hughes Professor of Spanish

ext.: 20543

email : p.swanson@sheffield.ac.uk

Professor Phil Swanson studied as an undergraduate at the University of Liverpool and carried out postgraduate research at the University of Edinburgh. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and the USA.

Phil Swanson is Head of the Department of Hispanic Studies. His departmental teaching focuses on Latin American literature, Hispanic cinema and representations of Hispanic culture.

His areas of research centre principally on film and modern Latin American literature, with special reference to issues of identity, politics and popular culture, the nueva narrativa, the Boom and the Post-Boom.

Publications

He has published widely in these areas, including books on Donoso, García Márquez and the New Novel. Titles include:

• The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
• Latin American Fiction: A Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
• The Companion to Latin American Studies (London: Arnold, 2003)
• The New Novel in Latin America: Politics and Popular Culture after the Boom (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995; second edition, 1998)
• Cómo leer a Gabriel García Márquez (Madrid: Júcar, 1991)
• José Donoso: The "Boom" and Beyond (Liverpool: Francis Cairns Press — Liverpool Monographs in Hispanic Studies, 1988)
• Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction (London and New York: Routledge, 1989)

Recent articles include the following:

• “Don Quijote y el detective postmoderno en la narrativa hispanoamericana”, El Quijote en América, ed. Friedhelm Schmidt-Welle and Ingrid Simson, Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2010
• “Going Down on Good Neighbours: Imagining América in Hollywood Movies of the‘30s and ‘40s (Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way)”, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 29, 1, 2010, 71-84
• “Latin Lessons for Young Americans: Isabel Allende's Fiction for Children”, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, St. Louis, 2007, 173-190
• “El número primo dos y la pareja de tres: binarios falsos en Donde van a morir los elefantes”, Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, Newark, DE, 7, 2, 2006
• “Z/Z: Isabel Allende and the Postcolonial Zorro”, Romance Studies, 24, 1, 2006, 265-77
• “The Post-Boom Novel”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel, ed. Efraín Kristal, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, 81-101
• “Novel Theatre: Egon Wolff’s Los invasores and the Idea of the New in Latin American Drama”, special edition of Bulletin of Spanish Studies in honour of Donald Shaw, LXXXII, 2005, 387-40
• “Authority, Identity and the Latin American Detective: The Mysterious Case of Mario Vargas Llosa - ¿Quién mató a Palomino Molero?”, special edition of Bulletin of Hispanic Studies in honour of James Higgins, Liverpool University Press, 2005, 216-227
• “Magical Realism and Children’s Literature: Isabel Allende’s La Ciudad de las Bestias (City of the Beasts)”, in A Companion to Magical Realism, eds. Stephen M. Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang, London, Támesis, 2005
• “The Defective Detective: Juan José Saer and the Case of La pesquisa”, special edition of South Atlantic Review: Latin American Fiction in the 1990s, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 67, 4, 2002, 46-62
• “California Dreaming: Mixture, Muddle and Meaning in Isabel Allende’s North American Narratives”, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies, Cardiff, 9, 2003, 57-63
  

Professor Swanson is President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland. He is an advisor to a number of journals, presses, and institutions. He is on the editorial board of the New Novel Review, Aracnofiles, Aurifex, the Bulletin of Latin American Research and the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies. He organised the New Novel Association's international conference on The Millennial Border: New Novel 1950-2050 in 1999.

He is currently engaged in a research project on representations of Latin America.