Rate My Professor Maite Usoz de la Fuente

Dr Maite Usoz de la Fuente is a Lecturer in Spanish in the School of Arts at the University of Leicester. Born and raised in Spain, she moved to the United Kingdom for postgraduate study and has lived there for most of her adult life. Her research expertise lies in contemporary Spanish literature and culture, with particular interests in the work of contemporary Spanish women writers such as Belén Gopegui and Marta Sanz, urban studies and spatial theory, and literary and cultural representations of and responses to the 2008 global financial crisis.

She completed her PhD at King’s College London, with a dissertation on the 1970s and 1980s Spanish urban youth movement known as la movida, focusing on the monthly arts magazine La Luna de Madrid; the thesis was awarded the 2014 AHGBI publication prize and published as the monograph Urban Space, Identity and Postmodernity in 1980s Spain: Rethinking the Movida (Legenda, 2015). She is co-editor, with Stuart Davis, of The Modern Spanish Canon: Visibility, Cultural Capital and the Academy (Legenda, 2018). Additional publications include articles and chapters on topics such as narratives of eviction in contemporary Spain, the politics of (in)visibility in contemporary Spanish literature, and gendered genres in life-writing. She serves as reviews editor on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Iberian Studies. Among her awards are the AHGBI Annual Publication Prize for a Doctoral Thesis (2014) and the Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Medal (2013). She is a member of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland, Women in Spanish and Portuguese Studies, and ALCES XXI.