Elisa Martí-López, Ph.D. New York University, Associate Professor
Associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her field of specialization is Catalan and Spanish literature and culture, with emphasis on the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, literary history and the novel. Her recent research addresses an apparent paradox that underlies the processes of cultural production and consumption in mid-nineteenth-century Europe--nations at different narrative stages became contiguous literary markets. She has challenged 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. Her book Borrowed Words: Translation, Imitation, and the Making of the Novel in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Bucknell UP, 2002) shows how the Spanish novel originated in those foreign texts, how the Spanish writers appropriated and borrowed from the original works to create the beginnings of the novel in Spain. She is currently working on a book on cemeteries, literary imagination, and modern narratives on death. She addresses, among other questions, the questions of how did literary imagination negotiated and reconciled the creation of modern urban cemeteries. If, as has been said, specific stories are the product of specific spaces, what and how did narrative strategies make the new cemeteries readable? How do we read the city from the new and urban cemeteries? Some of her scholarly work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bulletin Hispanique, Catalan Review, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, Siglo diecinueve, and The Cambridge Companion to the Spanish Novel from 1880 to the Present. She is also the author of two introductory books on Barcelona’s two major cemeteries.
She also teaches for the Comparative Literary Studies Program and the European Studies Program.
