Paula Pérez-Rodríguez
2024-2025
Marcel Bataillon
Princeton University
The Thought of Writing. The Paraliterary Lives of Matilde Fernández and Matilde
Biography
Paula Pérez-Rodríguez holds a Ph.D. in cultural and literary studies from Princeton University (2023), with a dissertation entitled Verboexorbitancias. El paso de “la literatura” a las artes verbales en España, 1909-1936. She has been a researcher at the Center for Artistic Research and Production Hangar (IX Fundación Banco Sabadell-Hangar Art Research Fellowship).
Her research explores the technological and cultural order of verbal and textual arts, the history of literate processes and radical and collective creative practices in the literary circuit. She has conducted scientific education, research, consultancy and/or transfer duties in different public and private institutions, such as the Santa Mònica Museum, La Capella, La Madraza (University of Granada), lugaradudas (Cali, Colombia) or Matadero-Madrid, and has coordinated and edited publications for Turner or Blatt & Ríos. She collaborates with the research group GICELAH (Instituto de Lengua, Literatura y Antropología, CSIC) and THECO (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid).
Research project
The Thought of Writing. The Paraliterary Lives of Matilde Fernández and Matilde Ras aims to simultaneously analyse (a) the cultural and scientific history of the spiritualist movement and graphological parascience in Spain and Europe and (b) the tactics surrounding the access of women to the public sphere, through the reconstruction of the mother-daughter relationship that existed between Matilde Fernández (1860?-1935), a spiritualist and feminist freethinker, and Matilde Ras (1881-1969), a famous graphologist of her time, but an ill-fated writer and woman of letters who accompanied successful writers such as Elena Fortún or Víctor Català (Caterina Albert) in their friendship and sexual identities.
The project seeks, on the one hand, to explore the political resistance proper to dissident motherhoods, a topic so far absent from the currents of Hispanic Cultural Studies. On the other hand, the proposal aims to rescue fundamental information about the ideas and practices used in the past around writing, particularly in an era marked by both mass literacy and the emergence of the typewriter.
Selected publications
2024. “Rutas sentimentales y transatlánticas: la literatura de Candaya. En conversación con Olga Martínez Dasi”. Ínsula. Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas, 928. ISSN: 0020-4536
2021. “La lengua hacia afuera. Voz y escucha en Miguel Benlloch y el contexto musical del Planta Baja”. Ensayos sobre lo cutre. Lecturas del Archivo Miguel Benlloch. Valencia, IVAM, 2021, pp. 87-97.
2020. “Historia conceptual del quinqui. Pluriempleo, policía, prensa y mito”. Kamchatka. Revista de análisis cultural, 16, pp. 55-91. https://doi.org/10.7203/KAM.16.16606
2019. “Hibridismo y estetización hispanoárabes: pliegues espaciotemporales y mestizaje en el hip hop”, en Marcos Ramo, María (coord.), El cine como reflejo de la historia, de la literatura y del arte en la filmografía hispanobrasileña. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 2019, pp. 563-577.
