Dr. Dolores Resano “My career trajectory was launched by the Institute for Discovery.”
Tuesday, 18 June, 2024
Pictured: Dolores Resano
Dr Dolores (Lola) Resano recently celebrated her first year in a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of English Studies at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.
Along with teaching a variety of modules from nineteenth-century American literature to Anglo-American cultural history, Dr Resano, from Argentina, is enjoying using her native language outside of work again, in a city famed for its vibrant street life and friendliness.
Formerly an Irish Research Council and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin (2018 - 2023), she says, of her rapid rise through the ranks of academia: “This trajectory is thanks to Elva O’Sullivan and the Institute for Discovery. I owe them everything because they are the ones who put me on the path to get here.”
Back in 2017, Dr O’Sullivan, engagement manager at UCD Discovery, organised for a colleague at the Institute to meet with Dr Resano and discuss potential postdoctoral grant applications.
The latter had recently completed her PhD in Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities from the Universitat de Barcelona, with a dissertation on post-9/11 fiction, satire, and public discourse.
Dr O’Sullivan also introduced Dr Resano to Liam Kennedy, Full Professor of American Studies and Director of the Clinton Institute at UCD. Both shared an academic fascination with then President Donald Trump and the potentially destabilising effect of the ‘alternative facts’ disseminated under his watch.
“Making connections between people and their shared areas of academic interest is something Elva does extremely well,” says Dr Resano.
Together Dr Resano and Prof Kennedy applied for an Irish Research Council postdoc grant to explore the impact of Trump’s presidency on American literature. The funding came through and Dr Resano moved to Dublin in 2018.
Two years later the pair received a Marie Curie Fellowship grant of €257,561 from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 framework for their project, ‘Transatlantic Approaches to Contemporary Literature in the Era of Trump’.
“Discovery were very helpful when we organised our Alternative Realities conference in December 2019,” says Dr Resano, of an event exploring how literature was responding to recent changes in political culture with the rise in populism, partisanship and nationalism in the United States and on this side of the Atlantic too.
“The Discovery Global Visiting Fellowship was invaluable as it gave us the opportunity to bring one of America’s leading authors, Aleksandar Hemon, as keynote speaker to Ireland.”
Discovery and Dr Resano also co-organised the closing event in the Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) which was open to the public.
Such was its success that a book project grew out of the conference, examining the role of American literature when the lines between fact and fiction become blurred in political discourse.
American Literature in the Era of Trumpism: Alternative Realities (Palgrave, 2022), edited by Dr Resano, considers some of the most recent responses to new American realities and includes analyses of works by Colson Whitehead, Ben Winters and Jennifer Egan, among others.
Meanwhile, as part of her Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCD, Dr Resano spent over a year as a Visiting Scholar in the Department of English and Creative Writing at American Ivy League school, Dartmouth College.
“I got to work with Professor Donald Pease who is one of the key figures in American Studies and he's on the board of the Clinton Institute too. Professor Pease was so supportive during my stay; for example, he made the connection for me to be able to attend an MA course for a full term with Professor Nancy Fraser, author of Cannibal Capitalism and one of the preeminent feminist scholars working today,” she adds.
Now along with her teaching in Madrid university, Dr Resano is part of a research project examining houses in American literature and a second group applying for funding for a project on Brexit, literature and identity.
“I am very grateful to Elva and Discovery for supporting my career from the outset and for putting me on this very fulfilling and inspiring trajectory.”