Current Projects

I serve as the Executive Editor of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies a new journal that will publish Volumes Seven and Eight this year. Beginning with Volume Three of the journal we began doing special sections. The first was on Madrid, edited by Professor Edward Baker. The theme for the special section volume 4 of the journal was border studies. . The section was edited by Professor Chuck Tatum, Dean of the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. The special section editor for volume 5 was Professor Joseba Gabilondo of the University of Nevada, Reno. The essays in this special section dealt with the theme of the Hispanic Atlantic. The special section of volume 6 will be Barcelona.

My major research project currently is a book on the relationships between space and capital as they intersect with the nature of the changes in the urban environment in Madrid from the late 1970s to the present. The working title for the project is Cities, Culture ... Capital. It is a collaborative effort with Professor Susan Larson of Fordham University. Most of my recent publications and conference papers form part of this book project.

A portion of what will be the chapter of images of Madrid on film was delivered at the Cine-Lit 2000 Conference in Portland, Oregon in February, 2000 as "Madrid as Cinematic City."
A Portion of the chapter on representations of Madrid in literature was presented at the MLA Convention in Chicago in December, 1999 as "Juan Madrid and the Space of Detection." Another portion will be presented at the Mid American Conference in September, 2002. "The Spanish Cartographic Imaginary" studies with work of Clara Sanchez.
Another portion of what will be the literature chapter was presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, in April, 2000 as "Jose Angel Manas and the Commodification of Youth Culture."
The role that urban planning in the urban processes that transform Madrid are an important component of the book project. I will address this topic in a paper to be delivered at the American Association of Geographers in New York in February, 2001 in a paper titled "The Politics of Place: Planning Madrid 1975 - 2000." At the 2002 AAG in Los Angeles I presented a paper on the intersection of graphic design and urban planning in "Designing Madrid: Urban Consciousness and Cultural Commodification in the Post-Cambio Era." The two AAG papers will be published in a revised form in an essay in the journal Cities.
At the M/MLA Convention in Kansas City in November, 2000 I argued for the reexamining the question of national identity through the lens of the urban process in "Urban Identities." At the M/MLA in Cleveland, 2001 I looked at how resistance to capital is played out in Colombian and Spanish film in "Communities." In a third M/MLA paper to be presented in St. Louis I will deal with how the concept of scale is useful in negotiating the slippery terrain of urban, national, post-national and global perspectives on space and culture in "Post-National Fissures and Urban Cement: Issues of Scale and the Nature of Recent Cultural Transformations in Spain."
I was invited to Rutgers University in March, 2001 as part of their distinguished lecture series on cities. I will speak about the urbanization of consciousness and how it is materializes in recent Spanish film and fiction that either presents a commodified view of place or configures itself as a way of resisting the processes of flexible accumulation. The title of the essay is "Recasting Urban Identities." The essay was published in the electronic journal Arachne
My essay on urban planning in Madrid will be published in the journal Cities late in 2003.
At the University of Florence in March 2003 I will teach a short course on contemporary Madrid and its culture.
I co-authored, with Susan Larson, a review article on recent books on Spanish cities and their cultures that appeard in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.
I have edited a volume on Madrid and its culture with Professor Edward Baker. The volume is a greatly revised version of the essays that appeared as a special section on Madrid in Volume 3 of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. Alianza Editorial in Madrid is publishing the book its title is De Fortunata a la M: 40: Un siglo de cultura urbana.

Another on-going book project is a biography of the Spanish novelist Luis Martin-Santos. This is a project on which I have been working for a number of years.