Bécquer Seguín is Associate Professor of Iberian Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on the literary, cultural, and political history of modern Spain, with secondary interests in political theory, intellectual history, and cultural sociology.

Seguín’s first book, The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain (Harvard University Press, 2024), examines how opinion journalism has shaped contemporary literature. Centered on the newspaper El País, where one in every three opinion columnists is a novelist, the book shows how a group of Spanish novelists during the 1980s and 1990s used their opinion columns as extensions of their novels and their novels as column-writing by other means, constantly troubling the fiction-nonfiction divide. The book was called “engaging, well-researched, and sharply written” by the Times Literary Supplement and was recognized as new and notable by the New York Times Book Review and Le Grand Continent.

Seguín’s current book project, tentatively titled Lorca Against Empire: How a Spanish Writer Became an Anticolonial Icon, tells the remarkable story of how generations of anticolonial writers across Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas took up the task of interpreting, adapting, and translating the work of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, who was murdered by Francoist forces in 1936, at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. This work has been generously supported by a 2025 Catalyst Award.

He is the Editor of the MLN Hispanic Issue and serves on the advisory boards of boundary 2, Hispanic Review, and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. His scholarly writing has appeared in these journals as well as in Critical Inquiry, ARTMargins, Post45, the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and numerous other journals and edited volumes. In addition to his scholarship, he has covered Spanish politics and culture for The Nation since 2015 with Sebastiaan Faber. He also regularly writes, in English and Spanish, for other newspapers and magazines, including El País, Slate, Dissent, CTXT, and Public Books, where he co-edits the sections on literature in translation and sports, and has provided commentary for CNBC, WNYC, KPFA and other television and radio stations.

At Hopkins, he is currently Interim Director of the Program in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, Academic Director of JHU Madrid, and a faculty affiliate of the Center for Advanced Media Studies. His research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen, and an AGHI Faculty Fellowship. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 2016, where he was Graduate School Dean’s Scholar.

Seguín teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on a range of subjects, from modern Iberia and comparative literature to art history and political theory. Below you will find a partial list of such courses:

• Readings in Contemporary Literary Criticism and Theory (Graduate)
• Populism
• Literature of the Great Recession
• Catalonia and Independence
• Wild Surrealism: Lorca, Dalí, Buñuel
• Contemporaneity and Crisis (Graduate)
• Novelist Intellectuals
• Public Humanities Writing Workshop (Graduate)
• Mapping Identity in Modern Iberia
• The Politics of Spanish Painting

He regularly includes undergraduates in his research. His undergraduate mentees have gone on to pursue postgraduate study at Cambridge University, Princeton University, Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School, University of Michigan Law School, Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, among other institutions.

He is especially committed to mentoring graduate students in research and public writing. His students have published pieces on topics ranging from the Colombian writer Fernando Vallejo to Mexican-American border and from Hebrew translations of Yiddish stories to what Orlando Furioso tells us about Game of Thrones. His current advisees are Rhiannon Clarke, whose dissertation on Lorca and materiality has been supported by a Fulbright Research Award, and Alicia Piñar Díaz, whose dissertation on colonial memory in contemporary Spain has been supported by numerous grants to conduct research in the Philippines and Spain. In 2021, he was awarded the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Graduate Teaching and Mentoring Award.

Book

• The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain (Harvard University Press, 2024). 

Edited Volumes

• The Legacies of the Spanish Crisis (Duke UP, boundary 2)
• Political Romanticism in the Americas, (with Ana Sabau) Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 

Articles and Chapters

• “Carl Schmitt’s Don Quixote,” Critical Inquiry
• “Two Voices of the Spanish Crisis,” boundary 2
• “Environmental Apocalypse and the Spanish Crisis Novel,” HIOL
• “José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies
• “Podemos and the Ideals of Populist Proceduralism,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies
• “The Transatlantic Turn,” in New Approaches to Latin American Studies,
• “Mute Cries: Louis Althusser Between Wifredo Lam and Roberto Álvarez-Ríos,” ARTMargins
• “‘Hitler Wants to Be Defeated’: On Borges, Freud, and the Death Drive,” Variaciones Borges
• “On the Easel of Independence,” Hispanic Review
• “Trotsky, Eisenstein y Las Hurdes: Dialécticas políticas en el cine de Luis Buñuel,” Hispania

Other Academic Writing

• “Why Write for the Public,” Post45
• “Making Academic Knowledge a Public Good,” KWI Blog
• Review of Zakir Paul’s Disarming Intelligence, Critical Inquiry
• Review of David Kurnick’s The Savage Detectives Reread, Critical Inquiry
• “El pasado, presente y futuro del periodismo digital ibérico: una entrevista con Emilio Doménech,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
• Review of Diana Arbaiza’s The Spirit of Hispanism, in Revista Hispánica Moderna
• Review of Luis Moreno-Caballud’s Cultures of Anyone, in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 
• Review of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism, in MLN
• Translation of Louis Althusser, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos.” ARTMargins
• Translation of Louis Althusser, “Letter from Wifredo Lam to Louis Althusser.” ARTMargins
• “Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” (with Mozelle Foreman) diacritics

In addition to his scholarly work, Professor Seguín regularly contributes essays, reporting, and criticism to El País, The Nation, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Awl, Dissent, CTXT, Howler, Jacobin, and Public Books, where he co-edits the sections on literature in translation and sports. He also provides commentary for CNBC, WNYC, KPFA, and other television and radio stations. Below you will find a selection of pieces and commentary in English.

Recent reporting on Spain with Sebastiaan Faber:

• “Spain’s Left Is in Turmoil—and the Right Has Gone Nuts,” The Nation, December 20, 2023.
• “Spain’s Left Has Pulled Off a Stunning Electoral Comeback,” The Nation, July 26, 2023.
• “Spain’s Left Is in Turmoil—and Now It’s Facing a Huge Electoral Test,” The Nation, June 6, 2023.
• “Can Catalan Pardons Pave a Way Out of Spain’s Territorial Crisis?” The Nation, July 8, 2021.
• “The Center Cannot Hold in Spain, but Can the Left Take Advantage?” The Nation, May 3, 2021.
• “How the Fight Over Spain’s Anti-Fascist Legacy Involves a Former ‘Nation’ Editor,” The Nation, December 28, 2020.
• “Spain Just Formed Its First Left Coalition Government in More Than 80 Years,” The Nation, January 7, 2020.

Full archive (2015– ) at The Nation

Culture writing:

• “Mind the Gap Between Novel and Newspaper,” Berlin Review [auf Deutsch]
• “The Enduring Influence of the Op-Ed,” The Millions
• “Autofiction without the Auto,” LitHub
• “The Poet-Historian,” Slate
• “Spanish Civil Wars,” Public Books
• “Thus Bad Begins,” Full Stop
• “Mortifying Miniatures,” Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Exotic Minutiae,” Slate
• “Two Almodóvars,” Los Angeles Review of Books
• “The Civil War of Memory,” Los Angeles Review of Books
• “The Spanish-Speaking William F. Buckley,” Dissent
• “As Podemos Rises in Spain, Will Feminism Rise With It?” In These Times
• “Podemos’s Latin American Roots,” Jacobin
• “Imperialists for ‘Human Rights,’” Jacobin
• “Populism and Other Epithets,” Dissent
• “The Syriza of Spain,” Jacobin

Sports writing:

• “Soccer for Intellectuals,” Public Books
• “The Many Crimes of Jesús Gil,” Howler
• “What Should The Olympics Sound Like?,” The Awl
• “Why Do the Green Bay Packers’ Opponents Stay at a Radisson in Appleton?” Slate
• “Germany’s Julian Weigel and the Future of Tiki-Taka,” Howler

Media: 

• “How The New York Times Shaped the El País Opinion Page,” Observatorio Cervantes, Harvard University, March 2025.
• “How Literature Influences Our World,” Harvard Brief, October 2024.
• Pleibéricos, October 2024.
• KPFA Evening News (Weekend), April 2019.
• “Left Out of Spain’s National Question,” The Dig, May 2018.
• “Tens of Thousands March as Crisis Escalates in Catalonia,” WNYC’s The Takeaway, October 2017.
• “Spain May Be Driving Catalans to Support Independence,” CNBC’s Closing Bell, October 2017.
• “Catalonia Voted for Independence: Now What?” WNYC’s The Takeaway, October 2017.

Bécquer Seguín (Alaska, 1987) es ensayista, periodista, editor y profesor titular de literatura española en la Universidad de Johns Hopkins. Doctor en romanística por la Universidad de Cornell, es colaborador habitual de El País y CTXT. En 2015, El País lo destacó como “uno a seguir” entre los hispanistas en los Estados Unidos.

Su primer ensayo, The Op-Ed Novel, traza la historia de los novelistas intelectuales desde la transición hasta la actualidad, centrándose en un grupo en particular—Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Almudena Grandes, Javier Cercas y Fernando Aramburu—que transformó la literatura contemporánea a través de sus columnas de opinión. El libro fue publicado en inglés por el sello Harvard University Press en 2024.

Últimos artículos:

• “Trump contra Emilia Pardo Bazán,” El País
• “El tren de la izquierda: Almudena Grandes, una mujer columnista,” El País
• “El imperio de la cita,” CTXT