Representations and Images of Frontiers and Borders

Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wrocław, Poland. She is the author of California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion’s Novels: Exiled from Eden (2019; 2020); and Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity, and the Maternal (2007). She is the co-editor of A Dark California: Essays on Dystopian Depictions in Popular Culture (with Agata Zarzycka, 2017) and Interiors: Interiority/Exteriority in Literary and Cultural Discourse (with Sonia Front, 2010). Her research interests include critical post-humanities, anti-speciesism, and feminism.

Alejandra María Aventín Fontana holds degrees in Hispanic Philology from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, a Diploma in Hispanic Culture from the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, and a Master’s Degree in Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language from Antonio de Nebrija University, Spain. She received her doctorate in Hispanic Literatures and Literary Genres in the Western Context from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Since 2010, she has been a Professor and Researcher at Carlos III University of Madrid. Her research focus is the impact of poetry on the representation of functional diversity, contemporary Hispanic poetry, feminism, gender studies, and ecocriticism.