Faculty
Assistant Professor
Nicolás Fernández-Medina
Ph.D., Modern Spanish Literature (2007), Stanford University
Ph.D., Humanities (2007), Stanford University
My research interests span a diverse set of topics within literature and philosophy. I am especially interested in the history of Enlightenment liberalism, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, philosophy of science and social development, Modernist aesthetics, identity and subject formation, and modern Spanish poetry. My work has explored the relations that bind ideology and text; the problematics of self, alterity and reflexivity; Avant-garde cultural practices; theories of progress and degeneration (social, discursive, and political); narrativity and representations of the feminine; and the literature of existentialism.
In my book The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ (U of Wales P, 2011), I redefine how Machado’s fundamental concerns regarding the structures of intersubjective engagement operate at the intersection of poetry, folklore, and philosophy. I champion Machado’s aphoristic and often overlooked “Proverbios y cantares” as advancing a Romantic-inspired practice of fragment thinking capable of bringing to light the most variegated examinations of the self/other dialectic. In my current book project titled The Primal Feeling of Life: Vitalism and the Building of Spanish Modernity 1769-1939, I explore the broader conceptual frameworks underwriting the theories of life phenomena that pervaded Spanish modernity. My aim is to reveal by what means Spanish anatomists, physicians, philosophers, poets, and literary theorists interrogated what makes life life and fundamentally shifted how we think about the practice of epistemology and desires such as freedom and autonomy.
My teaching interests range across genres and periods and include the Enlightenment, Romanticism, liberal political thought in Europe, the fin de siglo, women’s literature, the Avant-garde, and philosophy. I also work on post-Civil War Spanish poetry, and in particular its turn toward existentialism phenomenology. My courses include “Liberty and Liberalism,” “Romanticism,” “The City as Text: Theorizing Urban Landscapes,” “The Dilemma of Modernity in Spain,” “Changing the Subject: Literature in Italy and Spain 1880-1914,” “The Spanish Avant-garde,” and “The Spanish Civil War and its Aftermath.”
I am the recipient of the Institute of Arts and Humanities Resident Scholar Grant (2012-2013), the Richard Rorty Fellowship from the Benjamin Franklin Institute at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares (2010), as well the Team-Teaching Grant and Challenge Grant from the Institute of Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2008). I was also awarded Stanford University’s distinguished Centennial Teaching Award (2007). In 2005, I had the honor of participating as a respondent to the roundtable debates commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Príncipe de Asturias Awards in Oviedo, Spain.
Link to full CV.
