Matthew J. Marr

Matthew J. Marr (Ph.D., University of Virginia) is Associate Professor of Spanish. His research focuses on contemporary cultural production in Spain, with publications on film, fiction, poetry, and comics. In addition to these interests, his teaching encompasses modern Spanish literary history, thought, and society, while regularly engaging with topics in a global context. His work has been supported by grants from Spain’s Ministry of Culture (2017, 2010) and the Penn State Institute for the Arts & Humanities (2017, 2013). Prior to moving to Penn State in 2007, he held faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and Middlebury College.

His most recent book (under review) is Cine inmobiliario: Home, Place, and Property in Contemporary Spanish Film. Exploring fictional and documentary cinema produced in Spain during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it draws on insights from fields including cultural geography, affect theory, sound studies, and film theory as it highlights a dialectic of movement and immobility that operates across both film-as-form and the spatial logic of real estate. Analyzing a selection of Spanish motion pictures varied by region and genre—from established and emerging filmmakers alike—the book builds on a substantial body of recent interdisciplinary scholarship concerned with global cinema’s reflections on the ties between immovable property, dwelling, and notions of home as place.

He is the co-editor (with Samuel Amago) of Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain (University of Toronto Press, 2019), a volume that considers how Spanish comics practitioners have deployed image-text connections and alternative methods of seeing to interrogate memory and history, the economic and the political, the body and mental geography. In The Politics of Age and Disability in Contemporary Spanish Film: Plus Ultra Pluralism (Routledge, 2013), he takes up the cinematic construction of adolescent, senescent, and disabled subjects in an interdisciplinary analysis positioned within a broader conversation on visual culture and multiculturalism in democratic Spain. His first book, Postmodern Metapoetry and the Replenishment of the Spanish Lyrical Genre, 1980-2000 (La Sirena, 2007), examines self-referentiality in the work of leading voices within Spain’s post-Franco poesía de la experiencia movement—poets whose playful, ironic, and comic forms of self-consciousness aim to re-engage contemporary readers in a broader project of creative renewal.