Josep Anton Fernàndez Montolí

Josep-Anton Fernández (Barcelona, 1963) has a PhD in Modern Languages from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor's degree in Catalan Language and Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB).

Since 2007 he has taught Catalan Studies at the UOC Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Until 2006 he was a senior lecturer of Catalan Language and Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, where he founded and directed the Centre for Catalan Studies. Between 2015 and 2018 he was director of the department of Language and Universities  at Institut Ramon Llull.

He specializes in 20th and 21st century Catalan literature and culture, with an emphasis on subjectivity, identity and representation. His approach is interdisciplinary, drawing from cultural studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and psychoanalytic criticism. He carries out research in three main areas:

● Analysis of the literary and audiovisual representation of sexual identity, especially homosexuality, both in itself and in its intersections with other forms of identity, especially nationhood. This research focuses on 20th and 21st century Catalan gay literature (Terenci Moix, Lluís Fernández, Blai Bonet, Biel Mesquida, Maria Mercè Marçal, Lluís Maria Todó, etc.) and on Catalan film (Ventura Pons).

● A more general reflection on subjectivity, centred on the category of gender. He has explored aspects of Catalan literature by 20th-century female authors (Mercè Rodoreda, Maria Mercè Marçal, Montserrat Roig, María Barbal, María Jaén, Maria Antònia Oliver, Najat El Hachmi, Silvana Vogt) and has analysed how the construction of masculinity intervenes in institutional dynamics, such as authorship in the novels of Quim Monzó or in autobiographical texts (Lluís Maria Todó, Xavier Pericay, Joan Triadú, Joan Ferraté). Part of this research focuses on matters of subjectivity in Catalan poetry, exploring the works of authors such as Joan Vinyoli, Blai Bonet, Maria Mercè Marçal, Antoni Clapés and Dolors Miquel.

● Work in cultural studies and popular culture (especially television), with a focus on culture politics, identity construction processes, the problem of the legitimization of minorities, the symbolic dimension of subordination, the dialectic between universality and particularity, and representations of immigration. His book El malestar en la cultura catalana (2008), which analyses cultural normalization in Catalonia and its consequences, falls within this line of work.

He has published the books El malestar en la cultura catalana: La cultura de la normalització 1976-1999 (2008) and Another Country: Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction (2000); he is the editor of El gai saber: Introducció als estudis gais i lèsbics (2000) and co-editor of the following volumes: Calçasses, gallines i maricons: Homes contra la masculinitat hegemònica (2004, with Adrià Chavarria), Funcions del passat en la cultura catalana contemporània: Institucionalització, representacions i identitat (2015, with Jaume Subirana), and Narratives of Violence (2021, with Teresa Iribarren and Roger Canadell). He is currently preparing a collective book on the representations of immigration in Catalan literature (for University of Wales Press). As a poet, he has published L'animal que parla (2021), which won the Ausiàs March de Gandia 2020 poetry prize.