Chair of Romance Studies, Head of Portuguese, Professor of Spanish and Iberian Studies
Research and Teaching
Professor Fernández-Medina holds PhDs in Spanish Literature and Humanities from Stanford University (2007). Before joining the faculty at Boston University, he taught at Pennsylvania State University where he was Professor of Spanish and Philosophy. His research and teaching interests focus on Spanish and Iberian literature and culture between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Enlightenment thought, Romanticism, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, the history of medicine, the fin de siglo, decadence, women’s literature, Modernist Studies, and the Avant-garde (la vanguardia).
Professor Fernández-Medina’s books include Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity (MQUP, 2018), Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (co-edited, Routledge 2016), and The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’ (Wales UP, 2011). His critical translation Morbidities and “The Concept of the New Literature” by Ramón Gómez de la Serna will appear with Clemson UP. He has a book in preparation titled Raising the Dead: Resuscitation and the Reanimated Body in Spanish Science and Literature, which explores how questions associated with resuscitation resonated in Spanish culture, particularly from the perspective of modernity’s unending fascination with the life/death divide. His articles have appeared in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispanic Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Anales de la literatura española contemporánea, Romance Notes, Cincinnati Romance Review, Latin American Literary Review, Luso-Brazilian Review, and Insula, among others.
Professor Fernández-Medina is the recipient of the François Chevalier Fellowship from the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies, the Edward and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund, Institute of Arts and Humanities Resident Scholar Grant, Richard Rorty Fellowship from the Benjamin Franklin Institute at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, as well the Team-Teaching Grant and Challenge Grant from the Institute of Arts and Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was awarded Stanford University’s distinguished Centennial Teaching Award. He also serves on the PMLA Advisory Committee, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee (AAHM), as well as on the editorial boards of various journals. Currently, he is the Series Editor of the Iberian and Latin American Cultures monographic series with McGill-Queen’s University Press. For more information on publishing with MQUP’s ILAC series click here.
As the founding director of the Iberian Modernist Studies Forum housed in the Department of Romance Studies, Professor Fernández-Medina also organizes lectures, presentations, colloquia, and events dedicated to the study and research of Iberian modernisms.
For personal website and CV, click here.
Selected Publications
Fernández-Medina, Nicolás. Life Embodied: The Promise of Vital Force in Spanish Modernity. McGill-Queen’s UP, 2018.
Fernández-Medina, Nicolás; Truglio, M., eds. Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy. Routledge, 2016.
Fernández-Medina, Nicolás. The Poetics of Otherness in Antonio Machado’s ‘Proverbios y cantares’. Wales UP, 2011