Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

BY RHIANA FULLAN AND NATALIE HOWLEY

In a cosy office in the Hispanic Studies Corridor, situated on the second floor of Exeter University’s Queen’s Building, we met with Katharine Murphy, a Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Studies, to discuss her path to academia. Despite the darkness and hailstorm outside, Katharine’s enthusiasm to share her “transformative” experiences was not dampened. She began by taking us back to the 90s which was when she started studying at the University of Exeter.

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As a student of Spanish with subsidiary French, she had a great passion for languages and culture. Her fondest memory of her time at University was actually the time she spent in the culture that inspired her later work. Her year abroad was spent in Burgos, as an English language assistant in an instituto for 11-16-year-olds, an experience she describes as a “baptism of fire”: thrown in with 40 students in one class and left to “sink or swim”. Yet it is exactly this uncertainty and learning curve that made her year abroad an amazing experience. Katharine explains: “It really is a unique opportunity. An opportunity to work and live in a different culture and at a point before you’ve really consolidated career plans or a career path.” It was during her year abroad that Katharine discovered her love for teaching, in spite of the challenges it presented.

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Throughout her time as a student at the University, she was inspired by one lecturer in particular: Carlos Alex Longhurst. Students of her module Spain and 1898: from Disaster to Modernity may recognise his name from the secondary reading for this course. He was a professor at the University of Exeter and his passion was for early twentieth-century Spain and European thought. “It was this focus of his that sparked my interest in looking across borders and beyond national contexts, and looking at transnational connections in cultural production in different European countries.” This eventually led to Katharine undertaking a PhD supervised by Alex Longhurst after a PhD funding opportunity was offered to her in the Spanish department; “It was a moment of serendipity, where these things just come together.” During her PhD, Katharine discovered how much she enjoyed “being part of an academic community and having the chance to pursue [her] own interests.” From there, it seemed a logical decision to go into academia.

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As a successful critic, lecturer and researcher at the University of Exeter, Katharine has been able to observe the changes to the Modern Languages department over the years. She explains that when she was an undergraduate, students of a modern language had to study main periods in history and literature as compulsory foundation subjects. Today, by contrast, “there is a huge amount of choice and flexibility, and students can combine all sorts of subjects.” She notes how these days “we put much more focus on the Modern period, Modern cultural studies… film, gender studies and more [focus] on interdisciplinarity as well.”

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We asked whether Katharine thought that the course curriculum back then gave students an advantage over today’s undergraduates, offering a comprehensive knowledge of history and literary movements throughout the ages. She revealed that the way the course used to be did mean everyone had a good “grounding across lots of different core areas”. Today, though, with the options to choose modules which suit our interests, students can focus on what inspires them most and “build up a real specialisation in one area”. While she admits that, in some cases, it might be beneficial for students to look at some of the gaps in their background knowledge, overall, she thinks that the shift to a broader range of choice and an interdisciplinary approach is progressive. After all, “there is always the opportunity for independent scholarship” on broader historical contexts.

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It is precisely her independent scholarship that Katharine is most proud of in her own career. Academics, Katharine explains, often work in teams – teaching, planning lessons, organising conferences, and sharing in the success. The outcomes of independent scholarship, however, are entirely her own, and are a direct reflection of her research and hard work. A widely published scholar, Katharine has just released her newest book, Bodies of Disorder: Gender and Degeneration in Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez, a project that has been five intense years in the making. We had the pleasure of seeing the first, and at the time only copy, and the book is now available in the library on Streatham campus.

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Bodies of Disorder builds on Katharine’s existing focus on early twentieth-century Spanish fiction and particular interest in Pío Baroja, looking at both Baroja and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s work. She combines this with her more recent interest in representations of women and health; through an examination of how this is depicted in the work of both authors, she compares these popular representations to medical discourses and cultural assumptions of degeneration at the time. The result is “an original analysis of the ways in which late nineteenth-century medical discourses and cultural myths of degeneration focused on reproduction and the female body”.

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A common thread is visible in much of Katharine’s work, with the topic of one project leading naturally to that of the next. This pattern holds true with the idea for her newest research project, which clearly results from Bodies of Disorder. Last month, Katharine began leadership training. Her plan is to apply new learnings to her next research project, focusing on wider narratives of sickness and well-being in early twentieth-century Spain, and aligning these with literature from authors of the Generation of 1898 (a collective of novelists, essayists and thinkers in Spain during the Spanish-American war and subsequent period of national decline referred to as El Desastre) and the post-war period. This work is in its early stages, but with a milestone like Bodies of Disorder recently released, Katharine feels “there is a bit of space to move on now”.

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For those students who are considering following a career path like Katharine’s, she has offered a few tips. Notably, scholars realise that going into academia today is a considerable investment, both financially and time-wise. For this reason, Katharine advises students to “think long-term and think about what sort of culture and environment [they] would like to work in”, and to take into account the many benefits academia brings. As demonstrated by Katharine’s successful scholarship of wide-ranging topics related to early twentieth-century Spanish fiction, “few careers offer as much freedom as academia does, and creative freedom to pursue what you’re interested in”. Students should ask themselves what they have “to gain from and contribute to a culture that values knowledge, […] independence and pursuit of personal interest.”

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For those less inclined to pursue the academic route, as students of Modern Languages they are nonetheless well prepared for their future endeavours. Katharine remarks that: “Employers today are much more used to the idea of scope and range and interdisciplinarity” that today’s degree courses offer, and students can thus use their academic studies to pursue their interests, even if these lie outside academia. Having seen first-hand the evolving nature of Bachelor’s degrees in a modern language at the University of Exeter, Katharine recognises that the many changes in recent years have been in response to what students seek out of a degree: the possibility to gain skills, experience and knowledge useful to their future careers, wherever and whatever these may be. “Student voices are important”, Katharine insists, “and they’re being heard.”