Jean Andrews
Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies, Faculty of Arts
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Biography
My main interests are poetry in English and the major Romance languages, literary translation, Hispanic religious painting in the Renaissance and Baroque and nineteenth-century opera on Hispanic themes. I have published on all of these areas and supervised or am in the process of supervising posgraduate research on some of these areas.
Teaching Summary
Teaching for 2011-2012
I teach translation from Spanish to English both as a language learning exercise and as a professional skill to final year students who have had the benefit of a year abroad and can operate at a relatively high level as translators.
I teach a module on Hispanic Painting to first years. This module covers painting in Portugal, Spain, Latin America and the Portuguese settlements in the Far East from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.
I run a final year module which examines depictions of Spain and Portugal by travellers, writers, composers and artists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and writing, music and painting from Spain and Portugal which engages with national and regional identity over the same period.
I teach the seventeenth century play The Trickster of Seville on our first year Introduction to Literature module. This is the play which lays the foundation for all subsequent treatments of the Don Juan theme.
I have also taught or contributed to modules on comparative literature, Spanish cinema and Spanish poetry at Nottingham over the years.
Research Summary
My current research takes two strands: religious painting in Iberia and Colonial Latin America and Womens' war literature.
I have been interested for some time in tracing the trajectory of representation of the Blessed Trinity in the Habsburg-influenced lands of Europe and the New World. The Trinity is often incidental to depictions of other important religious moments, such as the assumption of a saint into Heaven or an episode in the life of Christ or the Virgin. The nature of the incidental represenations of the Holy Trinity, I believe, may be a way of analysing religious practice and in particular the type of mystical influences which held sway at any given moment in a national or regional culture. Much of the painting I have been looking at is either by secondary figures or unidentified painters, often more reliable conduits for trends of any sort than painters of genius who actually set the trends. This journey, which begins in the Burgundy of the future Holy Roman Emperor and Spanish king Charles V in the fifteenth century, is extensive and moves, ultimately, from as far east as Hungary and the debate with Orthodoxy to the western edges of indigenous Southern American culture in the High Andes. This is a very long-term project. In the shorter term, I am also working on the painting of the little-known Spanish painter, Luis de Morales (c.1520-c.1586). Morales produced, to commission, a very focussed body of work entirely of religious images, mainly of Christ, the Blessed Virgin and episodes from the New Testament. His work appears to have been influenced by the mystical currents prevalent in south-western Spain in his lifetime and thus may offer worthwhile insight in to religious practice at the time.
My second strand revolves around women's war literature in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. I have just published, with Manchester University Press, an edition of the Civil War poetry of the Spanish poet and first woman member of the Spanish Royal Academy, Carmen Conde (1907-1996). II have translated this collection, Mientras los hombres mueren (While the Men are Dying) which was written in the Spanish city of Valencia between 1937-1939 under conditions of bombardment, shortage and destruction, into English and will publish it alongside the war photography of Gerda Taro and Kati Horna, both of whom worked in Spain during the Civil War. Allied to this, I will be pursuing comparative research on a group of women war writers from this period: among them the English-language poets Lynette Roberts (1909-1995) and Sheila Wingfield (1906-1992 ), the Francophone Russian novelist, Irene Nemirovsky (1903-1942) and the Spanish poet and political activist Lucia Sanchez Saornil (1895-1970).
Recent Publications
2012. ‘Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Depiction of the Aztec Emperors for the Viceregal Entry in to Mexico City in 1680’. In: Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe Brepols. (In Press.)
2012. ‘St Joseph as Loving Father in Seventh-Century Painting: Josefa de Óbidos and Diego Quispe Tito’ Anthropos. 107(2), (In Press.)
2012. Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe Brepols. (In Press.)
2010. 'Luis de Morales' Representations of St Jerome'. In: Humanism and Christian Letters in Early Modern Iberia Cambridge Scholars Press. 185-201
Past Research
I began my research career as a comparatist, working on the reception of Irish writing in English in Spain in the period 1890-1930, while keeping in mind the seminal importance of Paris and French writing in both cultures at the time. I moved from there to work on twentieth-century women's writing in Spain, notably Carmen Martin Gaite and from there to consideration of film adaptations of opera on Spanish themes (Carmen and Don Giovanni), some of this from a feminist perspective (French School). That led me to examine the invention of an exotic Ibero-American 'other' in both European and Latin American operas from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, an area on which I still occasionally work. I have also given some thought to festal culture in Mexico City in the late seventeenth century along the way. While this may look like a very eclectic bag, all of my enquiries have been motivated by a questioning of the nature of identitiy as constructed by and manipulated within high cultural forms. This continues to be the approach I use in my study of painting and war literature.