Nathan Douglas is a sixth-year Ph.D. student whose main research interests concern the relationships that inhere modern Catalan literature, culture, and politics from the nineteenth century to the present. His dissertation project, The Novel Bodies Politic in Spain and Catalonia, opens this discussion from the most contemporary vantage point possible, arguing that the turn to concern over bodily form and narrative form in the Catalan novel of the past decade encodes the unresolved questions of political form brought about by the ideological reignition of Catalan secessionism circa 2010. In addition to working through an archive of primary texts by Marta Rojals, Sebastià Portell, Eva Baltasar, and Irene Solà, the project also weaves together Marxist, psychoanalytic, and queer literary criticism. In 2020, Nathan’s work was awarded the first ever dissertation completion fellowship from the North American Catalan Society and the Institut Ramon Llull, a consortium for the promotion of Catalan culture consisting of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Govern de les Illes Balears, and the Ajuntament de Barcelona. His future research projects will include work on: Romanticist-turned-banker Bonaventura Carles Aribau; the novels of the great Catalan modernista Caterina Albert (better known as Víctor Català); and the literary allegory of the Catalan mountain from the 1830s to the present. Beyond academic work, Nathan is also a published Catalan-English translator, and his hobbies include going to the gym, cooking, and eating very long seafood lunches in Sant Pol de Mar, Catalonia.
The College of Arts