Members

Luz Mar González-Arias is Senior Lecturer in the English Department, University of Oviedo. Her research is primarily in the areas of body theory and Medical Humanities, as applied (mainly, but not exclusively) to the work of contemporary Irish women poets and visual artists. Her recent publications include essays on eating disorders, PTSD, cancer, disability, ageing, and death in Irish University Review, RISE: Review of Irish Studies in Europe, The Nordic Irish Studies Journal and the Palgrave volume Animals in Irish Literature and Culture. She has edited National Identities and Imperfections in Contemporary Irish Literature (Palgrave, 2017), and co-edited (with Monika Glosowitz) the special issue of The Polish Journal of Aesthetics on “The Affective Aesthetics of the Body in Pain” (51-4/2018). In 2016 and 2017 she curated the performances and exhibition of Amanda Coogan at the Niemeyer Centre (Avilés, Asturias).

Luz Mar is also a lover of the sea and the oceans, which has in recent years also led her into the field of the Blue Humanities. With Dexter Zavalza, she organized the seminar “New Directions in the Humanities: Surf Studies” (Oviedo, 2017) and has lectured on the intersections of surf and gender, and on illness and health in recent literature, photography and the visual arts on the theme of blue spaces and the Anthropocene. She is also a member of the scientific and cultural committees of the Surf & Nature Alliance, an international non-profit organisation dedicated to the conservation of marine environments.

She is the PI in the research project “END: Illness in the Age of Extinction. Anglophone Narratives of Personal and Planetary Degradation (2000-2020)”, financed by the Spanish National Research programme, and is currently curating artistic and performative interventions along the Atlantic coast. ON ILLNESS, an artistic response to the cancer poetry of Dorothy Molloy, was selected for the 2021 Artist-in-Residence Programme at LABoral Arts Centre (Gijón, Asturias).