DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

Elisa Martí-López has a Llicenciatura in History (1983) from the University of Barcelona, and a Ph.D. in Spanish Literature (1995) from New York University. Her field of specialization is Catalan and Spanish literatures and cultures, with emphasis on the nineteenth century.

Her research has addressed the apparent paradox that underlies the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, that is, the fact that nations at different narrative stages became contiguous literary markets. She is the author of Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Bucknell UP, 2002). In this book she challenges prevailing views of the development of the novel in nineteenth-century Spain by demonstrating how translations and imitations of foreign literary models became the foundation for the development of the bourgeois novel in Spain. She co-authored with Mario Santana “Spain 1843-1900,” in Storia e geografia., vol. III of Il romanzo, ed. By Franco Moretti (Eunadi, 2002), and is the author of “The Folletín: Spain Looks to Europe” in The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel From 1800 to the Present, ed. by Harriet Turner and Adelaida López de Martínez (Cambridge UP, 2003). She is currently working on a project   provisionally entitled The Urban Spaces of Death: Cemeteries as Narratives of the Modern City 1780-1918. It explores the culture of death in 19th-century Europe, in particular, the constitution and development of the city from the privileged site of the cemetery. She has published Un passeig pel Cementiri de PobleNou (2004), and Somnis de Barcelona: El Cementiri de Montjuïc, 1883-1936 (2008). Some of her scholarly work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Bulletin Hispanique, Catalan Review, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Siglo diecinueve, and Journal of Catalan Studies. She has translated into Spanish A Social History of Dying, by Allan Kellehear (Cambridge UP, 2007), for Editorial Globalrythyms (Barcelona, Spain); and the long essay “Bohemians before Bohemianism”, by Robert Darnton, also for Editorial Globalrythms (Barcelona, Spain). She has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago. She has recently received a IAS Benjamin Meaker Research Visiting Professorship (Bristol University, UK) and a research fellowship at the IGRS Institute for Cultural Memory (University of London, UK).