ALISON SINCLAIR
Fields of specialization: 19th- and 20th-century Spanish literature, culture and intellectual history; history of sexuality in Spain; psychoanalytic approaches to 19th-century novel; comparative literature; spread of cultural ideas in Europe
Date of birth: 20 November 1946
Education and Degrees:
1973, PhD in Spanish, ‘The use and purposes of distortion in Valle-Inclán’s Ruedo ibérico’, University of Cambridge;
1968, BA: Modern and Medieval Languages (French & Spanish: Class I, and Mrs Claude Beddington Prize), University of Cambridge.
Current position: Professor of Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History
Principal Previous Positions:
1976 University Lecturer in Spanish, University of Cambridge
1997 Reader in Modern Spanish Literature and Intellectual History, University of Cambridge
2001-3 British Academy Research Reader
Academic/Research Leadership, Public Service, Recognition, Honours and Awards
1996 and 2001 Member of Iberian assessment panel for HEFCE RAE exercises
2004 Chair of Faculty of Modern Languages, University of Cambridge
2007-9 President of Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland
2006-10 President of the Fellowship, Clare College, Cambridge
2007-10 Head of Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge
2011 Member of assessment panel for Philip Leverhulme prizes
2011-14 PI of AHRC-funded project on ‘Wrongdoing in Spain 1800-1936’
Principal Publications (Monographs and edited books)
1977 Valle-Inclán’s ‘Ruedo ibérico’: a Popular View of Revolution. London: Tamesis
1984 Madrid Newspapers 1661-1870: a Computerized Handbook. Leeds: Maney and Son
1993 The Deceived Husband: A Kleinian Approach to the Literature of Infidelity. Oxford: Oxford University Press
1998 Dislocations of Desire: Gender, Identity and Strategy in ‘La Regenta’. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
2001 Uncovering the Mind: Unamuno, the Unknown, and the Vicissitudes of Self . Manchester: Manchester University Press
2004 Alternative Discourse in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Intellectuals, Dissent and Sub-cultures of Mind and Body, special number of Bulletin of Spanish Studies 81 (6) edited by Alison Sinclair and Richard Cleminson, pp. 687-848.
2007 Sex and Society in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Hildegart Rodríguez and the World League for Sexual Reform. Cardiff: University of Wales Press
2008 Eugenics, Sex and the State, in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (2) (2008), 177-272, special number on comparative eugenics edited by Richard Cleminson, Martin Richards and Alison Sinclair.
2009 Trafficking Knowledge in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: Centres of Exchange and Cultural Imaginaries. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer
2014 Gentes de mal vivir. Ejemplaridad e infamia en el siglo XVIII, special monographic number of Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo 22, edition and prologue by Juan Gomis and Alison Sinclair.
2017 (forthcoming) Heroes of Wrongdoing: Bandits, Rebels and Outsiders in Spain from 1800, special monographic number of Bulletin of Spanish Studies, edited by Alison Sinclair and Samuel Llano
Selected Articles since 2000
- ‘Errant Strands and Loose Ends: subjugation and (dis)closure in the late nineteenth-century Spanish novel’, in Depicting Desire. Gender, Sexuality and the Family in Nineteenth Century Europe: Literary and Artistic Perspectives, ed. Rachael Langford and Giuliana Peri (Oxford, Peter Lang: 2005), 149-168.
- ‘The World League for Sexual Reform in Spain: Founding, Infighting and the Role of Hildegart Rodríguez’, in special number on the World League for Sexual Reform in Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (1) (2003), 98-109.
- ‘Setting up the Interlocutor: Two Case Studies in the Construction of Self in 1930s Spain’, Anthropology & Medicine 10 (2) (2003), 223-238.
- ‘ “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels…”: rhetorical practices in medical and religious discourse in 19th-century Spain’, commissioned article in Special Continental European Prose Issue of Nineteenth-Century Prose 32 (1) (Spring 2005) edited by Rosemary Lloyd, 97-127.
- ‘Love, again: crisis and the search for consolation: the Revista de Occidente and the creation of a culture’. Article for publication with Europe in Love project at KWI, Essen, in New Dangerous Liaisons, edited by Luisa Passerini and Liliana Ellena, Oxford/New York: Berghahn, 2010, 178-196.
- ‘Identifications, Abjects and Objects: Myths of Gender and Nation in the Early 20th-Century Spanish Novel’, in Spanishness in the Spanish Novel and Cinema of the 20th-21st Century, edited by Cristina Sánchez-Conejero Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, (2007), 181-190. ISBN 1-84718-346-8; ISBN 13:9781847183460.
- ‘Social Imaginaries: the Literature of Eugenics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 39 (2) (2008), pp. 240-246, in Eugenics, Sex and the State, a special number on comparative eugenics edited by Richard Cleminson, Martin Richards and Alison Sinclair. DOI information: 10.1016/j.shpsc.2008.03. Available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2008.03.007.
- ‘Construir lo esencial: Rosa Chacel y el discurso de lo femenino en la esfera pública’, Mujer, Literatura y Esfera Pública: España 1900-1940, edited by Pilar Nieva-de la Paz, Sarah Wright, Catherine Davies and Francisca Vilches-de Frutos, Temple University: Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, USA, (2009) 33-46. ISBN 978-0-89295-127-7.
- ‘Luxurious Borders: Containment and Excess in Nineteenth-Century Spain’, in A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies, ed. Xon de Ros and Geraldine Coates, (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 211-226.
- ‘Thinking in Pictures: Wrongdoers and Their Re-formulation’, in Festschrift for Alex Longhurst, ed. James Whiston and Julia Biggane, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 88: 7-8, 2011, 109-119.
- ‘Popular Faces of Crime in Spain’, in Constructing Crime: Discourse and Cultural Representations of Crime and ‘Deviance’, ed. Christiana Gregoriou (London: Palgrave, 2012), 145-161
- ‘La forja del prodigio: Pepito Arriola’, in WISPS Noughties volumen (forthcoming Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 142-163
- ‘¿Por dónde sacamos el placer? Literatura y límites de la experiencia en la cultura decimonónica de España’ in Isabel Maurer Queipo and Tanja Schwan (eds), Schmerz und Schrecken in den romanischen Literaturen seit dem 19 Jahrhundert (Dolor y espanto en las literaturas románicas a partir del siglo XIX), (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Brussels, New York, Oxford, Vienna: Peter Lang, 2015), 55-7.
- ‘Morality and Marginality: Knowing Right from Wrong’ in A Companion to Unamuno Studies, ed. John Macklin and Julia Biggane (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2016), 137-152.
- ‘Que se le eche la culpa a la criada: historias de ejemplaridad y culpabilidad en la literatura popular española de los siglos XVIII y XIX’, Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo (Cádiz) 20 (2014), 75-91.
- ‘Historias de dos desgraciadas. Estereotipos de la culpa en la literatura popular española de los siglos XVIII y XIX’ in Gentes de mal vivir. Ejemplaridad e infamia en el siglo XVIII, special monographic number of Cuadernos de Ilustración y Romanticismo 22 (2016), edition and prologue by Juan Gomis and Alison Sinclair, 57-78.
- ‘The Ambiguities of Retribution’, in Alison Sinclair and Samuel Llano (eds), Heroes of Wrongdoing: Bandits, Rebels and Outsiders in Spain from 1800, special monographic number of Bulletin of Spanish Studies, (forthcoming 2017).
- ‘How to Know about Right and Wrong’, en Andrew Ginger y Geraldine Lawless (eds), How to be in the Nineteenth Century: New Essays on Spanish Culture and Society, Andrew Ginger and Geraldine Lawless ed., Manchester University Press, 144-172 (forthcoming 2017).