Neus Penalba

My research interests include Contemporary Iberian Fiction and Film, viewed through the lens of Environmental Humanities. I am especially interested in how different cultural traditions intersect and find commonalities among similar or shared questions on topics like identity or society’s connection to nature. I explore these interrogations through various disciplines and methodologies, from Comparative Literature to Cultural Anthropology and Film Studies to Art History. I have put into practice this multidisciplinary approach in my first book, in which I examined the aesthetic elements of major Catalan novelist Mercè Rodoreda’s posthumous work, using European 20th-century ethnofiction (literature and cinema) and the pictorial primitivism of the avant-garde. I am working on the English version of my book Fam als ulls. Ciment a la boca. Una lectura de "La mort i la primavera", de Mercè Rodoreda, which was honored with the most prestigious prize for an essay written in Catalan –the "Premi Octubre Joan Fuster 2023" award. Since its publication last April, my book has received significant media attention in Barcelona.

My new project investigates the imaginaries of extinction in contemporary Iberian literature, analyzing how the representations of ecosystems and cultural loss are interlaced in the works of many Spanish, Catalan, and Galician authors.