Joan Ramon Resina
Professor Resina specializes in modern European literatures and cultures with an emphasis on the Spanish and Catalan traditions. He is Director of the Iberian Studies Program, housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute.
Professor Resina is most recently the author of Luchino Visconti Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury 2022). This is a study of three films from the late phase in Visconti's career generally grouped under the denomination of the German trilogy. In each of these films he combined aesthetic mastery with philosophical currents of thought from the periods represented to explore the genealogy of humanism's decadence. Previous books include Catalunya amb ulls estranyats. El Procès des Stanford: De la consulta del 9-N 2014 a la sentència del 14-O 2019 (Comanegra 2020), a running commentary on the rise of Catalan independence movement leading to the sentencing of Catalan MPs and social leaders to long jail terms on sedition charges. The Ghost in the Constitution. Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society (Liverpool University Press, 2017), where he explores ethical, historical, and cultural consequences of Spain's difficult relation with its past. Josep Pla: The World Seen in the Form of Articles (Toronto University Press, 2017), the first book-length study of this extraordinary writer in the English language. Del hispanismo a los estudios ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural (Biblioteca Nueva, 2009) lays out the rationale for the replacement of Hispanic Studies with a new discipline of Iberian Studies by contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie either in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions or in a vague cultural studies deprived of evaluative principles and oblivious of cultural history and linguistic diversity. Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008) traces the development of Barcelona's modern image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, Resina establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period, arguing that in the early 21st century municipal politics exhausted the so-called Barcelona model and the city entered a new era that is largely inconsistent with the forces that shaped its modern identity. Previous books include studies on nationalism and globalization (El postnacionalisme en el mapa global, 2005) detective fiction (El cadáver en la cocina, 1997), on the idea of the literary classic (Los usos del clásico, 1991), modernism (Un sueño de piedra: ensayos sobre el modernismo europeo, 1990), and the 12th-century emergence of the legend of the Grail in European literature (La búsqueda del Grial, 1988).
Resina has edited twelve collections of essays on various interdisciplinary topics, including myth and literature, city images, the avant-garde, Spanish cinema, Iberian Studies, historical memory, the new ruralism, repetition, and self-writing. He has published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, and Modern Language Quarterly, and has contributed to a large number of critical volumes of a broad variety of subjects. From 1999 to 2005 he was main Editor of Diacritics. And for years he has been a regular contributor to various Barcelona dailies. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University, as well as visiting appointments at foreign universities. He has received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowship among others.
Resina's teaching covers a broad spectrum of subjects reflecting his interest in philosophy, sociology, history, poetics, the novel, philosophy of language, and political science. He is happy to work with ambitious and broad minded students who are willing to explore less studied areas and shun the momentarily fashionable.
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Research Interests
- Catalan Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
- Modernism
- New Ruralism
- Philosophy and Literature