Juan Francisco Belmonte Ávila, “Using Literary, Game, and Queer Studies to talk about Victorian Novels and Alien Invasions: A Meta Keynote”
Dr Juan F. Belmonte Ávila is an Associate Professor at the University of Murcia, where he teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses on Cultural Studies and New Media Studies. His research focuses on how contemporary popular culture reproduces identities, with a strong focus on Game and Queer Studies. He has been a Fulbright scholar twice, both as a PhD. student (2009-2011, Indiana University) and as a postdoctoral researcher (2020, University of Utah). He is a member of the National Research Group “PID2022-137592NB-I00: Queer Memory on the Margins of Contemporary Anglophone Cultures”. His most recent publications include Unbound Queer Time in Literature, Cinema, and Video Games (an edited volume published by Routledge), “Meaningful Grunts and Radical ‘Blehs’: Polysemic Identities through Nonhuman Noise in Video Games.” (Journal of Sound and Music in Games, California Univ. Press) and “Playing with cowboys, outlaws, and spacefarers: The remediated American Frontier in video games.” (The Journalof American Culture, Wiley).
Juan Fran loves travelling, trying out new food, and discovering new great movies, video games, and books to devour. He is absolutely addicted to really spicy food, needs once in a while to walk for hours with no destination in mind, and has a cat who behaves like a not very intelligent dog and a dog who sees herself as a cat (without any of the usual feline or canine perks). He reads really cheesy manga when he is sad and once tried, and naturally failed, to turn his entire kindergarten class into fruit (melons, mostly).
Laura Monrós-Gaspar, “Women’s (her)stories in London’s Nineteenth-Century Entertainment Industry”
Dr Laura Monrós-Gaspar is Full Professor at the Universitat de València, teaching graduate and post-graduate courses on Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Classical Receptions and Adaptations. Her research focuses on women and nineteenth-century British theatre history, classical receptions in the long nineteenth century and in neo-Victorian contexts, on which she has published extensively. She is the PI of the research group “Literature, Arts and Performance” at the UV, Honorary Research Associate at the APGRD (University of Oxford) and founding member of VINS (Victorian and Neo-Victorian Society in Spain).
Besides her lifelong interests and fascination with rare books, manuscripts and theatrical memorabilia, she is a huge fan of Star Wars and musical theatre. She also enjoys acting and dancing, but her secret passion is attending live music concerts with her kid.
Pascual Cantos Gómez, “More than numbers: How frequencies lie in Linguistics”
Dr Pascual Cantos Gómez is Full Professor at the Department of English Studies at the University of Murcia. Passionate about unravelling the complexities of language, he teaches and researches topics such as corpus linguistics, statistical modelling, and the fascinating connections between language and human behaviour. As the head of the LACELL Research Group, his work delves into areas like semantic disambiguation and the linguistic patterns of clinical and deceptive discourse.
A dedicated academic, Pascual has published extensively and contributed to numerous research initiatives. Beyond the world of linguistics, he enjoys pondering mathematical puzzles, relaxing by the sea, and setting off on adventures to discover new places.
