Rodrigo Lopez Martinez

I am an Assistant Professor / Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the School of Modern Languages. I previously studied Literature, with a focus on Literary Theory, at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina), received a PhD in Latin American Cultural Studies from the University of Manchester (UK), and worked in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Aberdeen (UK).

My current research studies representations of psychotherapy and mental health in Latin American cinema and TV. With an interdisciplinary approach to Screen Studies and Medical Humanities, I examine how cultural perceptions of mental health illnesses and treatment have an influence on—and are influenced by—the broader social organization of life.

I am also interested in the links between psychoanalysis and literature in Argentina and Spain. Through the lens of Transatlantic Studies, I focus on authors and periodicals that transmitted psychoanalytic ideas from Argentina into Spain and used them as a vehicle for articulating debates about democratic culture and driving literary experimentation.

My monograph The Avant-Garde after Bolaño will be published by Liverpool University Press. It examines how the paradigmatic impact of the Chilean author Roberto Bolaño on Latin American literature has reshaped and revived the idea of the avant-garde in contemporary fiction.

I have also published peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, and Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.