University of Córdoba

María J. López is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English of the University of Córdoba. She has paid sustained attention to the work of J.M. Coetzee, on which she has published Acts of Visitation: The Narrative of J.M. Coetzee (Rodopi, 2011), and articles in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Literary Studies and Atlantis. She has also co-edited with Kai Wiegandt the special issue J.M. Coetzee and the Non-English Literary traditions (EJES, 2016). She has also published work on other South African and postcolonial writers, and on the modernist British writers Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett.

She has been a member of the research projects “Community and Immunity in the Contemporary Novel in English” (FFI2009-13244) (2010-1012), “Individual and Community in Modernist Fiction in English” (FFI2012-36765) (2013-2015), and the main researcher of the project "Secrecy and community in contemporary narrative in English" (FFI2016-75589-P) (2016-2019). In the framework of these projects she has co-edited with Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas and Paula Martín-Salván New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finited, Singular, Explosed (Routledge, 2018), and with Pilar Villar-Argáiz Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2021).

She has been visiting researcher at the Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies of the University of Nottingham (UK), the Department of English of the University of Duke (US), the Department of English of the University of York (UK), the “Coetzee Collective” at the University of Cape Town and the “National English Literary Museum” in Grahamstown (South Africa), the University of New South Wales (Australia), and the School of Oriental and African Studies (London).

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Publications

• Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction. Edited by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz. Bloomsbury, 2021.
• “Introduction: Secrecy and Community in Twenty-First-Centuy Fiction.” Secrecy and Community in 21st-Century Fiction. Edited by María J. López and Pilar Villar-Argáiz. Bloomsbury, 2021, 1-19.
• New Perspectives on Community and the Modernist Subject: Finited, Singular, Explosed. Edited by Gerardo Rodríguez-Salas, Paula Martín-Salván and María J. López. Routledge, 2018.
• “Moving in ‘a forest of hieroglyphs’: Enigmatic and mutable signs of identity in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55.5 (2019): 710-722.
• “The ‘Deadly Secret’ of the Prophecy: Performative and Parabolic Language in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen.” Theory Now: Journal of Literature, Critique and Thought 2.2 (2019): 148-164.
• “‘You are one of us’: Communities of Marginality, Vulnerability and Secrecy in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.” English Studies in Canada 38.2 (June 2012): 157-177.
• “Foe: A Ghost Story.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 45.2 (June 2010): 295-310.