Lecture Series: 'What would a feminist city be like?' – Talk by Dr. Patricia García

Dr. Patricia García presents “‘What would a feminist city be like?’: The female fantastic as concept and method in literary urban studies” as part of the Linda E. McMahon Distinguished Lecture series on April 6 from 4-6 p.m. in SciTech room C207.

In this presentation, Dr. García reflects upon the conceptual and methodological challenges and shortcomings that the field of Literary Urban Studies has experienced with regards to the gender dimension. She offers a tentative frame of analysis of the literary city that incorporates the contributions of feminist geographers from the past decades. She employs the so-called “female fantastic” as a paradigm to open new epistemological spaces that decolonize from a feminist perspective.

Dr. Patricia García is Distinguished Ramón y Cajal researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), where she currently develops a project on urban peripheries in contemporary literature. She previously held a postiion at the University of Nottingham (UK), as well as fellowships in Helsinki, Paris and Rhodes. She is the author of The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature (Palgrave, 2022) and Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature (Routledge, 2015), as well as numerous articles. She was the PI of the British-Academy project Gender and the Hispanic Fantastic and directs the research network Fringe Urban Narratives (urbanfringes.com).