Maria Àngels Francés

She has a degree and a PhD in Catalan Philology, and a degree in English Philology. She was Vice-Dean of Culture, Promotion, Research and Library of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Alicante (2009-2014) and director of the Department of Catalan Philology of the University of Alicante (2015-2017 and 2017-2019), where she currently works as a professor and teaches in the field of Contemporary Catalan Literature, Children's and Young People's Literature and Didactics of Literature, among other subjects. She is also a member of the Valencian Academy of Language and the Interuniversity Institute of Valencian Philology. Regarding her lines of research, she has specialized in autobiographical literature, gender criticism and the role of social networks in the dissemination of literature and the construction of the non-academic canon. As for the first area, she has formed part of several research projects in autobiographical literature ("Autobiographical forms in contemporary Catalan literature," "Diaries and canon", "The knowledge of the other: biographies and portraits in twentieth-century Catalan literature") and has participated in numerous books; for example, the volume Aproximació a l'altre / An approach to the other. Biographies, semblances i retrats / Biographies, resemblances and portraits (John Benjamins, 2015). In the second area, her research in literature from a gender perspective has resulted in a doctoral thesis and numerous publications, including the two monographs Feminisme i literatura: L'hora violeta, de Montserrat Roig (Arola, 2010) and Montserrat Roig: feminisme, testimoni i memòria (Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 2012), with the latter being awarded the Prize for Linguistic and Literary Studies within the framework of the XII Critics' Awards of the Interuniversity Institute of Valencian Philology (2014), and book chapters such as "The Turbid Azure of Being Three Times a Rebel: Commitment and Identity in the Works of M. Aurèlia Capmany,  Montserrat Roig and M. Mercè Marçal" (Springer, 2019), among many others. In addition, she has been an external advisor to the commission in charge of preparing the Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas Year, organized by the Valencian Academy of Language, which during 2020 and 2021 was devoted to paying tribute to this important Valencian writer. This has implied the publication of his complete works (Borja i Francés, ed., Carmelina Sánchez-Cutillas, Obra completa I. Poesia II. Prose, AVL, 2021), among other materials.  Regarding the third line of research, she has participated as a researcher in the project "Virtual spaces for the promotion of books and reading. Formulation of indicators to evaluate their quality and effectiveness" and in the "The non-academic literary canon: construction, characteristics, responsible, selection and reception in virtual public epi-texts," with studies such as "Literature to Twitter. Estudi del cas# Diadelllibre" (Zeitschrift für Katalanistik 32) and "Dialogic Creation of the Popular Canon and Social Capital on Twitter" (Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 98.10, 2021). She has also been an advisor to the Foundation for Books and Reading in the preparation of the Valencian Reading Plan of the Generalitat Valenciana.