Monica Jato

Prof

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

My research interests focus on cross-cultural comparative approaches to exile and migration. I am also interested in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish peninsular literature and culture. I am currently supervising theses on contemporary Spanish women writers, memory texts of the Spanish Civil War, carceral writing and forced migration.

20002023

Research activity per year

Personal profile

Research interests

My research focuses on new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Spanish exile culture and to the condition of exile more generally. I am particularly interested in exploring the different cultural strategies used by migrants to adapt to radical changes in their spatial environment. My monograph El éxodo español de 1939: una topología cultural del exilio (Brill, 2019) explores Spanish refugees' attempts to transform the at times dehumanizing sapaces of exile into 'places' as sites of cultural resistance and renewal.

I was the Co-Investigator of the three-year project (2017-2019) "Inner and Territorial Exile in Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain: A Comparative Study," funded by The Leverhulme Trust. Emerging from this project, my most recent monograph, Fractured Frontiers: The Exile Writing of Nazi Germany and Francoist Spain (Camden House, 2020) challenges the traditional view that inner and territorial exile constitute opposed and irreconcilable aspects of writing under oppression. In establishing the historical reality of both forms of exile and proposing inner exile as more than mere metaphor, it martials evidence to argue that the two bodies of writing can be viewed as opposite sides of the same exile coine. The comparative approach pursued, with its insights into common patterns of behaviour, provides a template for wider-ranging cross-cultural studies of fissure and legacy through longitudinal analysis of the discursive formation of alterity and displacement, territoriality and exterritoriality, and of contested national identity.

I am also interested in problematizing Spanish twentieth century literary historiography by introducing new perspectives into its canon and producing scholarly editions of underrepresented women's voices. I have published Silvia Mistral's Éxodo. Diario de una refugiada española (Cuadernos del Vigía, 2021) and Madréporas (Cuadernos del Vigía, 2019), Diario de un retorno: Correspondencia entre Cecilia G. de Guilarte y Silvia Mistral (Ulises, 2015), Cecilia G. de Guilarte's Un barco cargado de... (Renacimiento, 2012) and María Beneyto's Cuentos para días de lluvia (Institución Alfonso El Magnánimo, 2012).

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
  • SDG 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions

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