Joan Ramon Resina

OVERVIEW:

Professor Resina specializes in modern European literatures and cultures with an emphasis on the Spanish and Catalan traditions. He is Director of the Catalan Observatory at Stanford and serves as Director of the Iberian Studies Program, housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute.

Professor Resina is most recently the author of Del Hispanismo a los Estudios Ibéricos. Una propuesta federativa para el ámbito cultural. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2009. In this book he lays out the rationale for the overcoming of Hispanic Studies by a new discipline of Iberian Studies by contending that the field's response to the crisis of the Humanities should not lie either in the retrenchment into the national philological traditions or in a vague cultural studies deprived of evaluative principles and oblivious of cultural history. Another recent publication is Barcelona's Vocation of Modernity: Rise and Decline of an Urban Image (Stanford UP, 2008). This book traces the development of Barcelona's modern image through texts that foreground key social and historical issues. It begins with Barcelona's "coming of age" in the 1888 Universal Exposition and focuses on the first major narrative work of modern Catalan literature, La febre d'or. Positing an inextricable link between literature and modernity, Resina establishes a literary framework for the evolution of the image of Barcelona's modernity through the 1980s, when the consciousness of modernity took on an ironic circularity. The book ends with a highly critical view on the post-Olympic period, arguing that in the early 21st century municipal politics has exhausted the so-called Barcelona model and the city has entered an era that is largely inconsistent with the forces that shaped its modern identity. 

He has also published extensively in specialized journals, such as PMLA, MLN, New Literary History, and Modern Language Quarterly, and has contributed to a large number critical volumes. He has held teaching positions at Cornell University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Northwestern University and received awards such as the Alexander von Humboldt and the Fullbright fellowship.