Professor Philip Swanson
BA PhD
School of Languages and Cultures
Hughes Professor of Spanish
+44 114 222 0543
Full contact details
School of Languages and Cultures
2.31
Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
- Profile
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Professor Phil Swanson studied as an undergraduate at the University of Liverpool and carried out postgraduate research at the University of Edinburgh. He also studied in Oxford, Lisbon and Seville. He has taught at a number of universities in Europe and the USA. He has been a Senior Fulbright fellow in the USA, holder of a Leverhulme Fellowship, and grant holder from the British Academy, the Carnegie Trust and the Society for Latin American Studies.
Phil Swanson has held a number of chairs and is now Hughes Professor of Spanish in the School of Languages and Cultures at Sheffield. His departmental teaching focuses on Latin American literature, Hispanic cinema, representations of Hispanic culture and Comparative Literatures and Cultures.
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. He also works on crime and fiction as well as on imaginings of ‘Latin’ identity.
Phil also has a keen interest in Spanish and Latin American theatre and has acted in produced and directed around twenty-five Spanish-language plays.
- Research interests
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Professor Swanson is one of the world’s leading authorities on Latin American literature, especially the New Narrative of the Latin American Boom and Post-Boom. He is currently engaged in research projects on foreign representations and imaginings of Latin America and crime and fiction in Latin America.
- Publications
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Books
- The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garciá Márquez. Cambridge University Press.
Edited books
Journal articles
- Pop Goes the Boom : One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Latin American New Novel. Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, 53(2), 280-287.
- Reviews of Books. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 96(2), 217-231.
- Borges and Popular Culture. Hispanic Research Journal, 19(3), 250-264. View this article in WRRO
- Pop Goes the Boom: One Hundred Years of Solitude and the Latin American New Novel. Review (New York, 1968): literature and arts of the Americas, 50(2), 162-169. View this article in WRRO
- The Cambridge Companion to Modern Latin American Culture - Edited by John King. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 27(4), 600-602.
- Z/Z: Isabel Allende and the Mark of Zorro. Romance Studies, 24(3), 265-277.
Chapters
- Roberto Ampuero and the Neruda Case: The Detective, the Poet, the ‘Converso’ In Lange C & Peate A (Ed.), Crime Scenes: Latin American Crime Fiction from the 1960s to the 2010s (pp. 157-175). Oxford: Peter Lang. View this article in WRRO
- The Gangster in Hispanic American Cinema In Larke-Walsh GS (Ed.), A Companion to the Gangster Film (pp. 166-181). Wiley View this article in WRRO
- Borges and popular culture, The Cambridge Companion to Jorge Luis Borges (pp. 81-95). Cambridge University Press
- Introduction In Swanson P (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel García Márquez (pp. 1-6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- The Post-Boom novel, The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (pp. 81-102). Cambridge University Press
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garciá Márquez (pp. 57-63). Cambridge University Press
- View this article in WRRO
Book reviews
Other
- The Cambridge Companion to Gabriel Garciá Márquez. Cambridge University Press.
- Research group
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Supervised topics include: Magical Realism, Latin American Poetry, Manuel Puig, Psychoanalysis and Politics in Mario Vargas Llosa, Dulce María Loynaz, Zoé Valdés, Cristina Peri Rossi, The Absurd in Virgilio Piñera, Spanish Women Writers, Lucía Etxebarria, Nation and Region in Spanish Cinema, Humour and Fiction in Latin America, Body Modification in Mexican Visual Culture, Banditry in Mexico and the Southern US, Naturalism in Argentina, Race and Sexuality in Angola, Paolo Coelho and the Global Market, Mexican Drug Culture, Mining in Latin American Literature, Menstruation in Hispanic Culture, Disability in Spanish Culture.
- Teaching activities
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Spanish language at all levels
Spain: Courses on Spanish civilization and modern Spanish history. All periods of Spanish literature. Specialist courses on Lorca, Buero Vallejo, poetry, modern drama, film, sexuality and culture.
Spanish America: All periods. Specialist courses on theatre, poetry, fiction 1900-60, fiction 1960 to present day, film, civilization versus barbarism, reality and fantasy, notions of the “modern,” politics and popular culture, sexual politics, women’s writing, Latin American identity, representations of Latin America.
Brazil: Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture.
Other:
Theory, practical criticism and approaches to Hispanic Studies. Interdisciplinary courses on poetry, film and the detective. Research training.
- Professional activities
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Phil Swanson is past President of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland and member of the Advisory Board for the UK’s Institute of Latin American Studies.
He has been an RAE panellist and served on a wide range of international professional and cultural organisations and institutions, grant-awarding bodies, editorial boards and review panels. He has been an assessor for a vast number of journals, publishers, universities and other academic bodies.
He was named Man of the Year by the American Bibliographical Institute Board of International Research. He has made numerous appearances on radio, television, in the print media and in public lectures.
Has been External Examiner in around fifteen universities and has externally examined about fifty PhDs across five continents. He is a well-known figure in the Spanish-speaking world and has appeared as a character in a novel by one of Spain’s leading writers, Lucía Etxebarría.