Stephen Hart is Professor of Latin American Film, Literature and Culture at University College London. He has published widely on the life and work of César Vallejo, including César Vallejo: A Literary Biography (2013), as well as founding the Centre of César Vallejo Studies at UCL. He has been awarded an Order of Merit by the Peruvian State and elected as a Corresponding Member of the Peruvian Academy of Language. He has recently published a new biography of Santa Rosa de Lima and a critical edition of Santa Rosa’s Apostolic Process in a research project funded jointly by the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust.
Robin Wallis, our Senior Editor, is a consultant on Spanish teaching and examining who has lived, worked and travelled in Spain and Latin America. Like Stephen, he gained a First in Modern Languages from Downing College, Cambridge, before taking a Master’s in International Relations and embarking on a career in the diplomatic service. He has been Chief Examiner for Pre-U Spanish and led the Spanish Departments of two schools into teaching the qualification. He is a tour lecturer for UK visitors to the Spanish-speaking world and has facilitated community support projects between institutions in the UK and the developing world.
Francisco Compan graduated in Philology at the University of Oviedo in his native Spain before moving to Dorset over ten years ago. He is currently Head of Modern Foreign Languages at Canford School, a Principal Examiner for Cambridge Assessment and an exam board consultant with an interest in Spanish and Latin American literature and linguistics. He is also involved in teacher training for UK and international language courses.
Sander Berg teaches modern languages at Westminster School, where he was Head of Spanish between 2011 and 2019. He has a degree in French and Linguistics from the University of Amsterdam and another in Spanish and Portuguese from the University of London, where he also did a PhD in early modern Spanish literature. Between 2004 and 2010 he worked as a tour guide in Latin America during the holidays. He also translates academic articles and literary texts.
Nathanial Gardner is a tenured academic at the University of Glasgow. His doctoral studies at University College London focused on the methods writers used to represent marginal classes in contemporary Mexico. This led him to publish books and articles on the works of Elena Poniatowska and other Mexican women writers such as Laura Esquivel and Silvia Molina as well as branching into the study of photography as a way of understanding text-image relations in Latin America. Nathanial is the author of a critical guide on Como agua para chocolate which was originally published by Grant and Cutler as has since been republished by the Bulletin of Advanced Spanish and the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.
Helen Laurenson is Head of Spanish and Head of Modern Languages at University College School, London. She studied Single Honours Spanish, completing a PhD entitled ‘Images of Women in the Early Poetry of Rafael Alberti’ in 1994. She was Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Leeds until 2006, and published on García Lorca and Rafael Alberti in the Bulletin of Spanish Studies and the Modern Language Review and in several edited collections, as well as teaching modules on Spanish film. She is an examiner and item writer for AQA A-level Spanish, and has a passion for the lyrics of Joaquín Sabina and Argentina.
Alfredo Benito is a half journalist-half Spanish teacher working currently in London in both fields. Graduated in Journalism at the University Complutense of Madrid, he worked as a radio and TV journalist for different Spanish media until 2012. His passion for teaching and the arrival of the economic crisis led him to become a teacher, firstly doing an intensive course at Cervantes Institute and immediately afterwards getting a Masters degree in secondary school teaching. Now, he is combining his work as an Assistant Spanish Teacher at City of London School with his work as a freelancer TV correspondent in London for several Spanish broadcast TV stations.
William Chislett (Oxford, 1951) is Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at the Elcano Royal Institute., Madrid. He covered Spain’s transition to democracy for The Times of London between 1975 and 1978. He was then based in Mexico City for the Financial Times between 1978 and 1984. He returned to Madrid on a permanent basis in 1986 and since then, among other things, has written 20 books on various countries. The Elcano Royal Institute published between 2002 and 2016 four books of his on Spain. He wrote a monthly review of Spain (Inside Spain) for the Institute between April 2004 and September 2021, and since November 2021 writes a monthly post on Spain. He has been a visiting scholar at Bilkent University, Ankara, and at New York University and has spoken at the universities of Oxford, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, Georgetown and the London School of Economics. He curated the exhibition on Arturo Barea (1897-1957) in the Cervantes Institute, Madrid, in 2018 and organized various acts in memory of the Spanish émigré writer, including a square in Madrid bearing his name. The Spanish government granted him Spanish nationality in November 2021 under the special system known as Carta de Naturaleza in a Royal Decree.
Selected Publications: Microhistoria de España (Espasa, 2020), A New Course for Spain: Beyond the Crisis (Elcano Royal Institute, 2016), Spain. What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2013), Spain and the United States. The Quest for Mutual Rediscovery (Elcano Royal Institute, 2005), Spanish Direct Investment in Latin America: Challenges and Opportunities (Elcano Royal Institute, 2003) and The Internationalization of the Spanish Economy (Elcano Royal Institute, 2002).
Bulletin of Advanced Spanish 