Faculty
Associate Professor
Matthew J. Marr
Associate Professor of Spanish
N-355 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
(814) 863-7613
mjm66@psu.edu
Ph.D., M.A. in Spanish (University of Virginia)
B.A. in Spanish and English (College of William & Mary)
Matthew J. Marr specializes in contemporary Peninsular studies, with an emphasis on poetry, fiction, and cinema produced from Spain’s post-Franco transition to democracy through the present. In examining how literary and filmic texts reflect, promote, and negotiate this period’s dynamic turn toward a culture of pluralism, his scholarship engages with a host of theoretical debates (postmodernism, transnationalism, age and disability studies), topical and methodological interests (humor in poetry, youth countercultures, intertextuality, comparative approaches to the novel), aesthetic trends and movements (“Generation X,” la poesía de la experiencia, social-issue cinema), and authors/filmmakers (among others, Esther Tusquets, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Javier Cercas, José Ángel Mañas, Vicente Gallego, Luis García Montero, Alejandro Amenábar, and Pedro Almodóvar).
Prof. Marr’s essays have appeared in journals including Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and Letras Peninsulares, as well as in the edited collection Generation X Rocks: Contemporary Peninsular Fiction, Film, and Rock Culture (Vanderbilt UP, 2007). His first monograph, Postmodern Metapoetry and the Replenishment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre, 1980-2000, was published in 2007 by La Sirena. Currently in preparation, his second book is entitled The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film: Plus Ultra Pluralism, and is scheduled to appear on the Routledge Advances in Film Studies Series in 2012. Research for this project conducted at the Filmoteca Española (Madrid) was funded in part by a 2010 grant from the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities.
Before coming to Penn State in 2007, Dr. Marr held a faculty position at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2004-07), as well as visiting appointments at Northwestern University (Fall 2006, by invitation) and Middlebury College (2003-04). He currently serves as Graduate Officer for Penn State's Ph.D./M.A. program in Spanish.
For publications and courses see: http://www.personal.psu.edu/mjm66/.
