Local author M. G. Sanchez recently took part in the British Association for Modernist Studies annual conference.

The conference was organised by the Institute of English Studies and was held at the Strand campus of King’s College.  

Dr Sanchez gave a joint presentation alongside Sara Ceroni of the University of Massachusetts. The title of their presentation was ‘Disorienting Modernism: James Joyce and the Andalusian/Gibraltarian Cosmopolis’ and it focused on how James Joyce represents Gibraltar and the Andalusian hinterland in his novel Ulysses, considered by many scholars to be the most important novel of the twentieth century.   

Mark Sanchez said: "Sara demonstrated how Joyce saw peaceful, cosmopolitan Gibraltar as a counterweight to the troubled, strife-ridden Ireland of the 1900s, while I tried to show how he consistently prioritises civilian experience over military experience in the Penelope section of the novel. Part of the point that I wanted to make is that, despite being published almost a hundred years ago, Ulysses presents a much more nuanced and balanced view of Gibraltarian cultural hybridity than that seen in programmes such as Channel Five’s Gibraltar: Britain in the Sun."