About our Researchers

 M. Isabel Santaulària Capdevila

Isabel Santaulària i Capdevila is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics of the Universitat de Lleida. For the last six years, she has also been Dean of Studies of the Faculty of Arts.

Her primary research interests are popular narratives (both written and visual media), gender studies and cultural studies and she has written numerous articles in indexed journals, book chapters and a monographic book focusing on the relationships between popular narratives, gender and society. As a specialist in gender studies, especially masculinities studies, she has focused on how popular genres help to perpetuate traditional forms of masculinity. She is also very interested in popular narratives as sites of contestation and as arenas where new forms of masculinity can be articulated and promoted. In the same line, she has applied her pro-feminist stance and background in feminist theory to the study of how popular narratives sponsor feminist agendas without disregarding the limits of postfeminism and the forces that prevent the full advance of women.

Apart from feminism and masculinities studies, she has pursued other academic interests resulting from different research projects she has participated in, including postcolonial, transnational and neo-colonial literature and criticism, posthumanism and cultural gerontology. These varied lines of enquiry have often coalesced in analyses that have allowed her to explore interesting interconnections, as they are expressed in popular narratives, such as: neo(sino)-orientalism and crime (fiction), ageism and ageist discourses in horror and fantasy or the potential of the posthuman for the advancement of feminism.

In all cases, she has always been moved by a desire to vindicate the value of popular narratives as cultural heritage and as essential tools to understand the world we live in.

Publications

Chapters in books

“You Are All Too Old to Do Anything but Get Yourselves Killed: Age and Masculinity in Stephen King’s It, Dreamcatcher and Dr Sleep”. Aging Masculinities in Contemporary U.S. Fiction, Josep M. Armengol (ed.). Chan, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 63-76.

“Monstrous Final Girls: The Posthuman Body in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and M.R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts”. Final Girls, Feminism and Popular Culture, Katarzyna Paszkiewicz and Stacy Rusnak (eds.). Chan, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 173-188.

“Mujeres profesionales y domesticidad/maternidad en las series detectivescas anglo-sajonas: El caso de No Offence”. La maternidad en la ficción contemporánea, Mariona Visa et al., eds. Bern, New York and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020. 309-324.

“They Aren’t the Big Bad Communists We Were Raised to Think They Were? The Representation of Russia in Contemporary Crime Fiction and Thrillers”.  Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space: Borders, Networks, Escape Lines, David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds.). Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017. 179-200.

“¡Así que se trata de un caso político después de todo!’ Ficción detectivesca emplazada en China y Rusia”. Novela negra y otros crímenes: La visión de escritores y críticos, Gustavo Forero Quintero (ed.). Madrid: Planeta, 2013. 129-152.

 

Articles in academic journals:

“Mandarin Oriental: The Cosmopolitan Stranger in Lisa See’s Dragon Bones.” Papers on Language and Literature. 58.1 (2022): pp. 96-117.

“Age and Rage in Terry Pratchett’s ‘Witches’ Novels.” European Journal of English Studies. Volume 22, No 1. 2018. 59 – 75.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2018.1427201

“Typescript of the Second Origin and Current YA Dystopian and Post-Apocalypse Fiction in English: Prefiguring the Female Hero.” Alambique. Didáctica de las Vivencias Experimentales. Volume 4, No 2. 2017. 1 – 20.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5038/2167-6577.4.2.5

“’This Is Getting a Little Too Chinese for Me’: The Representation of China in Crime Fiction Written in English.” Coolabah. No 20. 2016. 67 – 82.
Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10459.1/59766

“Female Professionals and (Neo)Victorianism: The Case of The Good Wife.”  Victoriographies. Volume 6, No 1. 2016. 5 – 24.

“This Is China and Shit Happens: Space in Rock, Paper, Tiger by Lisa Brackmann and Other Crime Narratives Set in China and Russia.” Clues: A Journal of Detection. Volume 33, No 1. 2015. 101 – 111.