Lourdes López-Ropero

Lourdes López-Ropero is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Alicante, where she teaches Contemporary and World Literature in English. Before joining this university in 2001, she obtained her Masters Degree in English from the University of Kansas, and a PhD from the University of Santiago de Compostela, having conducted part of her doctoral research at the Centre for Caribbean Studies of the University of Warwick. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina, University of West Chester, and San Diego State University. She has participated as a researcher in the Socrates Thematic Network Project "ATHENA2: Advanced Network in Activities in Women's Studies in Europe" (2003-2006, 104547-CP-1-2002-NL-ERASMUS-TND, Local PI Silvia Caporale Bizzini), and in "Women and Public Space in Women's Writing, 1800-1980" (2003-2004, University of Alicante, PI Teresa Gómez Reus).

Her primary research focus has been in the fields of Postcolonial Studies and Memory Studies, with an emphasis on Caribbean and Black-British literature. Her interests also include young adult literature, spatial theory, and the contemporary afterlives of poetic genres such as the elegy and ekphrasis. She is the author of The Anglo-Caribbean Migration Novel: Writing from the Diaspora, and her articles have appeared Commonwealth, World Literature Written in English, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, English Studies, Concentric, or Social Identities, among other journals. Her most recent publications include “A Curator in the House of Memory: Restauration, Implication and the Post-Conflict novel in Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man", English Studies (2023); “Perimeters of Grief: Elegy in and out of Bounds in Fred D'Aguiar's Memorial Poetry”, Miscelánea (2021); or “Remembering Jonestown through the Camp and the Postcolony: A Multidirectional Reading of Fred D’Aguiar’s Children of Paradise", Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2020). She is currently co-editing the volume Spaces in Transit: Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes (with Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż).  She has recently supervised the thesis "Writing the Friend, Writing Difference: A Study of Contemporary Female Friendship in Fiction by Diaspora Women Authors" by Teresa Martínez-Quiles (international doctor).