Associate Professor of Spanish
Academic Degrees
Antonia Delgado-Poust earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from the Pennsylvania State University in 2011 and her B.A. in Spanish and French from Bucknell University in 2003. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary (20th and 21st century) Peninsular literature, film, and culture. In her research, she focuses on representations of gender, the female experience, cases of fragmented identity and (narrative) consciousness, as well as themes relating to historical memory and truth in post-Civil War literature and film. Her most recent publications in peer-reviewed journals and collections center on the strained relationship between mother and daughter and its correlative association with a crisis in female identity (“(It’s) All About the Mother: Scarred Memories and Amnesic Bodies in Rosa Montero’s La hija del caníbal.” Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 29 March 2016, pp. 1555-70.), the role of the Spanish female detective (“Rewriting the Iberian Female Detective: Deciphering Truth, Memory, and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century Novel.” Routledge Companion to Iberian Studies, edited by Javier Muñoz Basols and Laura Lonsdale, 2017, pp. 626-38.), as well as female antagonism in post-war Spain ("Women at Odds: Female Antagonism and Collusion With Patriarchy in Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida." Ciberletras, no. 42, August 2019, pp. 15-34.). In "El engaño de la piel: la transmutación alquímica del sujeto transexual en La piel que habito" (2020), Delgado-Poust considers the creative and transformative process undergone by the main protagonist –a non-consenting transgender female– of La piel que habito (2011) while comparing it to the age-old alchemical process, as the two share a common objective: the perfection, imitation, and adulteration-or falsification-of "nature." More recently, she has published an article titled, "The Deceptive Defense of a Woman Scorned: The Unreliable Narrator and Her Reworking of the Truth in Marina Mayoral’s Casi perfecto," in which she draws on Dorrit Cohn’s theories of discordant narration, arguing that the protagonist's narrative doubles as a feminist apology and a strategic reworking of truth, exposing systemic gender biases and the narrator-protagonist's struggle for intellectual and personal vindication. Currently, Delgado-Poust is working on a book project in which she examines how popular female-authored novels published in Spain between 1997 and 2006 articulate a profound sense of desencanto—or disenchantment—with the democratic Transition and its failure to dismantle patriarchal structures, such as systemic misogyny and authoritarianism.