Bécquer Seguín is Assistant Professor of Iberian Studies and the Senior Editor of the MLN Hispanic Issue. 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 is current working on a book titled The Op-Ed Novel: Spain and the Politics of Literary Persuasion, which is under contract with Harvard University Press. It examines why novelists have come to play an unusually prominent role in the Spanish public sphere since the country’s transition to democracy in the 1970s. Over the course of six chapters, the book analyzes the career arcs of Spain’s most celebrated novelist intellectuals as well as specific novels that emerged from opinion journalism. The book couches a national story about Spain in a global story about contemporary literature, asking how we should read novels from celebrated writers whose fiction betrays the unmistakable influence of their op-ed writing. He is also developing two further book projects, one on Carl Schmitt and Francoist Spain and another on the cultural afterlives of the Spanish Civil War.

Seguín is the co-editor of a scholarly dossier on political romanticism and the editor of a forthcoming volume on the legacy of the Spanish financial crisis. His research has appeared in boundary 2, Hispanic Review, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and other journals and edited volumes. In addition to his scholarship, he regularly writes on Spanish politics and culture for The Nation, Slate, Dissent, 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.

At Hopkins, he is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Advanced Media Studies and the Program in Latin American Studies as well as a core faculty of the Latin America in a Globalizing World initiative. He received his PhD from Cornell University in 2016, where he was an Andrew W. Mellon and John E. Sawyer Seminar Fellow and Graduate School Dean’s Scholar.

Seguín teaches 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

Book

• The Op-Ed Novel: Spain and the Politics of Literary Persuasion (under contract with Harvard University Press).

Edited Volumes

• “Legacies of the Spanish Crisis,” boundary 2 48.3 (2021).
• “Political Romanticism in the Americas,” (with Ana Sabau) Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28.1 (2019).

Articles and Chapters

• “Two Voices of the Spanish Crisis,” boundary 2 47.1 (2020): 65–95.
• “Environmental Apocalypse and the Spanish Crisis Novel,” HIOL (2019): 272–288.
• “José Zorrilla in Mexico: Transatlantic Romanticism and the Question of Artistic Labour,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28.1 (2019): 67–81.
• “Media Control and Emancipation: The Public Sphere in Post-15M Spain,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) in Spain After the Indignados/15M Movement: The 99% Speaks Out, eds. Óscar Pereira-Zazo and Steven L. Torres (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 171–187.
• “Podemos and the Ideals of Populist Proceduralism,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 21 (2017 [2018]): 287–309.
• “The Transatlantic Turn,” in New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, ed. Juan Poblete (London: Routledge, 2017), 206–222.
• “Mute Cries: Louis Althusser Between Wifredo Lam and Roberto Álvarez-Ríos,” ARTMargins 6.2 (2017): 93–109.
• “‘Hitler Wants to be Defeated’: On Borges, Freud, and the Death Drive,” Variaciones Borges 42 (2016): 29–52.
• “Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost, and the Specter of Death,” in Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and France, eds. Regina R. Félix and Scott D. Juall (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2016), 177–192.
• “Podemos and Its Critics,” Radical Philosophy 193 (2015): 20–32.
• “On the Easel of Independence,” Hispanic Review 83.1 (2015): 1–26.
• “Trotsky, Eisenstein y Las Hurdes: Dialécticas políticas en el cine de Luis Buñuel,” Hispania 97.4 (2014): 600–611.
• “The Face of a Nation: Norma Aleandro as Argentina’s Post-Dictatorial Middle Class Icon,” (with Janis Breckenridge) in Latin American Icons: Fame across Borders, eds. Dianna Niebylski and Patrick O’Connor (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 137–146.
• “Posthegemony in Times of the Pink Tide,” Postmodern Culture 23.2 (2013).

Other Academic Writing

• Review of Diana Arbaiza, The Spirit of Hispanism, in Revista Hispánica Moderna 74.1 (2021): 119–122.
• “Why Write for the Public,” Post45 (2019).
• Review of Luis Moreno-Caballud, Cultures of Anyone, in Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20.1–2 (2019): 197–198.
• “Introduction,” (with Ana Sabau) Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 28.1 (2019), 1–2.
• Review of Joseph North, Literary Criticism, in MLN 133.5 (2018): 1439–1443.
• Translation of Louis Althusser, “A Young Cuban Painter Before Surrealism: Álvarez Ríos.” ARTMargins 6.2 (2017): 110–112.
• Translation of Louis Althusser, “Letter from Wifredo Lam to Louis Althusser.” ARTMargins 6.2 (2017): 115.
• “Cinema, Scenes, Aesthetics: An Interview with Jacques Rancière,” (with Mozelle Foreman) diacritics 42.3 (2014): 22–35.
• Translation of Álvaro García Linera, “The Communist Manifesto and Our Present: Four Theses on its Historical Actuality,” (with Bruno Bosteels) Plebeian Power: Collective Action and Indigenous, Working-Class, and Popular Identities in Bolivia (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 17–88.

In addition to his scholarly work, Professor Seguín contributes essays and criticism to The Nation, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Awl, Dissent, Howler, Jacobin, and Public Books, where he co-edits the sections on literature in translation and sports. Below you will find a selection of reported pieces, literary and film criticism, essays, and commentary.

• “How the Fight Over Spain’s Anti-Fascist Legacy Involves a Former ‘Nation’ Editor,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, December 28, 2020.
• “Spain Just Formed Its First Left Coalition Government in More Than 80 Years,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, January 7, 2020.
• “The Left May Finally Govern in Spain,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, November 22, 2019.
• “Spain’s Catalonia Crisis Just Got a Lot Worse,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, October 21, 2019.
• “Will Spain Follow Europe’s Right-Wing Populist Trend?” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, July 31, 2019.
• “In a Polarized Spain, Voters Give the Socialists Another Chance,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, April 30, 2019.
• “Is Spain’s Left-Wing Party Podemos Cracking Up?” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, February 7, 2019.
• “Spain’s Radical Right is Here to Stay—But did it Ever Leave?” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, January 10, 2019.
• “As Spain’s Government is Voted Out, Catalonia Continues its Roller-Coaster Ride,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, June 1, 2018.
• “Catalonia’s Elections Take Spain Back to Square One,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, December 29, 2017.
• “The Poet-Historian,” Slate, November 29, 2017.
• “Spain’s Conflict Over Catalonia Is Covering Up Massive Political Corruption,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, November 24, 2017.
• “Spanish Civil Wars,” Public Books, October 5, 2017.
• “The Catalonia Question,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation (October 23, 2017), 4.
• “Have Spain and Catalonia Reached a Point of No Return?” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, September 26, 2017.
• “Thus Bad Begins,” Full Stop, September 7, 2017.
• “Mortifying Miniatures,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 25, 2017.
• “Exotic Minutiae,” Slate, July 21, 2017.
• “Soccer for Intellectuals,” Public Books, June 2, 2017.
• “Two Almodóvars,” Los Angeles Review of Books, February 24, 2017.
• “The Many Crimes of Jesús Gil,” Howler (Fall 2016), 99-107.
• “The Spanish-Speaking William F. Buckley,” Dissent, September 28, 2016.
• “What Should The Olympics Sound Like?,” The Awl, August 12, 2016.
• “Spaniards Confront the Legacy of Civil War and Dictatorship,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, July 18, 2016.
• “Will Catalonia’s Regional Elections Lead to the Break-Up of Spain?” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, September 24, 2015.
• “The Spanish Media Are the Worst in Europe. These Upstarts Are Trying to Change That,” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation, September 15, 2015.
• “As Podemos Rises in Spain, Will Feminism Rise With It?” In These Times, May 13, 2015.
• “Podemos’s Latin American Roots,” Jacobin, March 27, 2015.
• “Can Podemos Win in Spain?” (with Sebastiaan Faber) The Nation (February 2, 2015), 12-17.
• “Imperialists for ‘Human Rights,’” Jacobin, December 19, 2014.
• “The Syriza of Spain,” Jacobin, July 25, 2014.

He also provides commentary for CNBC, WNYC, KPFA, and other television and radio stations. 

• The KPFA Evening News (Weekend), April 27, 2019.
• “Left Out of Spain’s National Question,” The Dig, May 30, 2018.
• “Tens of Thousands March as Crisis Escalates in Catalonia,” WNYC’s The Takeaway, October 23, 2017.
• “Spain May Be Driving Catalans to Support Independence,” CNBC’s Closing Bell, October 6, 2017.
• “Catalonia Voted for Independence: Now What?” WNYC’s The Takeaway, October 5, 2017.
• “Spain’s Efforts to Shut Down Catalonia’s Referendum,” KPFK’s Background Briefing with Ian Masters. September 28, 2017.