Jesús Varela-Zapata

Jesús Varela-Zapata is Professor of English at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has been a Dean of Humanities, Pro-Vicerector for Culture, as well as Director of the Domus do Mitreo University Museum. He is currently an associate editor of Revue Plurilingue: Etudes des Langues, Littératures et Cultures and has previously been a reviewer for other journals. He has been guest speaker at the universities of Cornell (NY), Ottawa,  Aichi-Nagoya and Kanazawa. He has coordinated several funded research projects such as "Las autobiografía femenina del Sur de los Estados Unidos: Genre, Gender, Race, Region" (Mineco, with Constante González Groba) and "Localismo y globalización en literaturas anglófonas del Caribe y Estados Unidos" (Xunta de Galicia).

He is the author of V. S. Naipaul: El retrato de la sociedad post-colonial desde la literatura de la Commonwealth. He has published numerous articles on world writers such as Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer or Derek Walcott, including “The Gods Disapprove of the Mingling of Peoples:  Conrad, Achebe and Gordimer on the Plight of Europeans in Africa”, Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses (1997); “Men of the People: Chinua Achebe’s Post-colonial Intellectuals and Politicians”, Atlantis (1997); or “Roots in the Water: Derek Walcott’s Caribbean Voice”, Nexus (2017), among others.  As regards women's writing, he has contributed to the volume  Hijas del Viejo Sur. La Mujer en la Literatura Femenina del Sur de Estados Unidos (PUV, 2012), edited by Constante González Groba, with the chapter “Sureña y Subalterna: Narrando la Rebelión de la Mujer en Alice Walker”. He has also published the chapter “The Self  Elsewhere: Alice Walker’s Identity in the Wider World”, as part of the collection Constructing the Self: Essays on Southern Life-Writing, edited by Carmen Rueda-Ramos and Susana Jiménez Placer (PUV, 2017). His latest publication is “The Long Way to Emancipation in Margaret Laurence’s A Jest of God”, Canada & Beyond (2024).