My general research interests are 20th-Century Spanish and Catalan narrative and cultural history, with special attention to the area of cultures in contact. I am working on an interdisciplinary research project, Peripheral Identities, based at Lancaster University, dedicated to the study of 'peripheral' cultures and identities in Europe. The publication in December 2002 of a special issue of National Identities entitled Peripheral Identities in the Iberian Context , with a critical introduction by Barberà and Crameri, is the first tangible outcome of the Peripheral Identities research group.
The study of the interplay of literature, cultural tradition and identity forms the basis of a new guest lecture series for 2009/10, "Reciprocal Gazes on Catalonia" (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/peripheral/events.html) which focuses on the narratives of multicultural writers. This has been organized as a series of papers to be given at Lancaster, starting on 9 February 2009 with J-L Marfany (Liverpool), 'A Cuckoo in the Nest? Castilian in Catalonia, 1500-1870',and continuing on 10 March with Francesca Ardolino (Barcelona),'Salvatore Quasimondo in Post-War Barcelona' etc. This new initiative is in part a follow-up to the colloquium "Reciprocal Gazes on the Iberian/British Other", successfully organized by F Barberà and K Crameri at Lancaster in 2004. As was the case with the 2001 and 2004 conferences, an anticipated outcome of the 2009/10 series will be the publication of research papersas a collective volume. In 2003, I obtained two grants, one from the Government of the Balearic Islands and one from the Catalan Government, to study the narrative works of writer Baltasar Porcel. In 2005-6 I was awarded a grant by the Institut Ramon Llull to carry out the study Barcelona as seen by its writers and cultural agents.
I am currently supervising one PhD thesis.
Events
New major publication co-edited by Lancaster scholar:
Gabriel Miró, Epistolario, edited by Ian R. Macdonald and Frederic Barberà, Obras completas, vol. XX. Alicante: Instituto de Cultura Juan Gil-Albert, 2009.
Gabriel Miró is a major novelist of the first thirty years of the twentieth century, a particularly brilliant period in Spanish culture. He was a writer of comparable achievement to Virginia Woolf, and was translated into English and French during his life time. Ian R. Macdonald (Aberdeen) and Frederic Barberà (Lancaster) have worked together for some years on the joint major project of publishing all of the known letters of Gabriel Miró. Such a complete collection of a writer's letters is still a fairly uncommon undertaking in Spanish scholarship, especially at the level of editing quality they have set themselves, and with a team of only two. The many problems have included finding many previously unknown letters, dating them, and creating full explanatory annotation. This epistolary constitutes an extremely rich document as it substantially portrays the cultural history of Spain in the early 20th century. Among Miró's addressees are the Nobel prize for literature J.R.Jiménez, the composer Enric Granados, the passeur culturel Valéry Larbaud (who discovered Miró and James Joyce to the French), or Antonio Maura, Prime Minister of Spain on various occasions and director of the Royal Spanish Academy for many years. The volume is part of the Complete Works currently being published. This volume is to be officially launched shortly in Madrid and Alicante.
