Faculty
Assistant Professor
Nicolás Fernández-Medina
Dr. Nicolás Fernández-Medina, Ph.D. in Modern Spanish Literature (2007) and Ph.D. in Humanities (2007), Stanford University. His area of specialization is late eighteenth- through twentieth-century Spanish literature and thought. He is especially interested in analyzing those junctures where literature and philosophy converge and provide a broader transnational and interdisciplinary understanding of Spain’s literary and cultural production.
Dr. Fernández-Medina has published widely in the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Latin American Literary Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, Ínsula, Anuario Hispanoamericano de Poesía (AEria), Torre de papel, BoletínRAMÓN, Signa – Revista de la Asociación Española de Semiótica, Espéculo, Abel Martín, El Pasajero, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poetry, Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets, The Companion to 20th Century American Poetry, and Imagining Ourselves: An anthology on a wide range of authors including Gómez de Avellaneda, Fernán Caballero, Thomas Page Nelson, Valle-Inclán, J. A. Silva, Martí, Antonio Machado, Gómez de la Serna, Champourcin, J. C. Melo Neto, J. A. Valente, J. L. Núñez, Michael Gizzi, and Robert McDowell. He is the recipient of Stanford University’s distinguished Centennial Teaching Award and Research Fellow Grant and has served as Assistant Editor for Nuevo Texto Crítico and MANTIS Poetry Journal. He also holds the distinction of being invited as a respondent to the roundtable debates commemorating the 25th Anniversary of the Principe de Asturias Awards in Oviedo, Spain, in 2005.
Dr. Fernández-Medina teaches graduate and undergraduate courses covering nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, art and philosophy. As a recipient of a Team-Teaching Grant and Challenge Grant from the Institute of Arts and Humanities at PSU and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dr. Fernández-Medina, in collaboration with Dr. Maria Truglio, is spearheading an interdisciplinary graduate teaching initiative on how turn-of-the-century Spain and Italy can be read as intersecting paradigms of Modernity. Part of this graduate teaching initiative includes a series of salons (tertulias) that will allow graduate students and invited professors from Penn State, UPenn and Brown, to engage in lively conversation.
His current research includes a book-length study on the poetic and philosophical currents in Antonio Machado’s “Proverbios y cantares,” as well as a critical translation of Ernestina de Champourcin’s early poetry. Other projects focus on the influence of nineteenth-century art and thought on the Spanish avant-garde, the shared lyrical vitalismo of Spanish poets of the 1920s and 30s, and the legacy of existential phenomenology on more contemporary Spanish poets.
