Natasha Tanna

Positions
Affiliated Lecturer in MML
College Teaching Officer
Fellow
Director of Studies in Spanish
Director of Studies for Part II MML at Christ's College

Department/College
St John’s College

Research
My doctoral thesis examines the connections between desire, sexuality, and transnational subjectivity in writing by women in Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Barcelona from the 1960s to the present day. The aim of the project is to explore the interplay between wandering subjects and non-normative desire, both of which challenge and disrupt the heteronormative foundations of the nation. My corpus includes narrative and poetic works written in Spanish and Catalan, as well as their performance and exhibition.

I consider the alternative communities imagined in works such as Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1995), Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984), and Flavia Company’s Volver antes que ir (2012), and their implications for both national identity and transnational subjectivities. In order to do this, I explore the effects of devices such as fragmentation, ekphrasis, and the inclusion of texts from other sites such as Wikipedia, as well as the authors’ desire to go beyond the written word to engage with the visual and spatial experience of texts in performance and exhibition. I argue that these techniques encourage the reader/spectator/participant/visitor to imagine future possibilities for the configuration of community through an emphasis on the particularity of experience, i.e ‘situatedness’, as highlighted by feminist critics such as Rosi Braidotti and Sara Ahmed. In the light of such critical approaches, I propose that the creative experience of these literary works strives to counter the false universality of hegemonic discourse.

Academic Publications
‘Sapphic Literary Genealogy in Maria-Mercè Marçal's La passió segons RenéeVivien’ in Reading Maria-Mercè Marçal: Aesthetics, Poetry and Feminism (ed. Noèlia Díaz-Vicedo, forthcoming with The Anglo-Catalan Society’s Occasional Publications)
Review: ‘Exilio en el espacio literario argentino de la posdictadura. By María Inés Cisterna Gold’ (forthcoming in Modern Languages Review)
Review: ‘Noèlia Díaz Vicedo, Constructing Feminine Poetics in the Works of a Late-20th-Century Catalan Woman Poet: Maria-Mercè Marçal and Montserrat Abelló and Noèlia Díaz Vicedo (trans.), Maria-Mercè Marçal's The Body's Reason: Poems in Catalan’ (Journal of Catalan Studies, 2014, ix-xiv)

Undergraduate Teaching
SPA2: Translation from Spanish into English (MML Faculty)
SPA3: Introduction to Hispanic Literature (MML Faculty)
SP10: Introduction to Catalan Language and Culture (MML Faculty)
Critical Theory for Modern and Medieval Languages Students (St John’s College)
Spanish Language / Spanish and Latin American History and Culture for Historians  (King’s College)

Other Teaching and Outreach
‘Spanish and Latin American Society, History and Culture’, Villiers Park Educational Trust Inspiring Excellence Programme (Residential Course for A2 students)
‘An Introduction to Spanish Cinema’, Cambridge Arts Picturehouse (Adult Education Evening Classes)
‘Reflections on the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship in Film’, The Sutton Trust Summer School (Residential Course for AS students)