About

Francesca Blanch-Serrat (she/her; frɑnˈsɛs.kɑ ‘blʌŋk sɑ’ɹ̈ɑt) is a researcher in the Department of English and German at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where she also teaches at undergraduate level. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the ERC-funded Project WINK: Trans-Genre Writing and the Gendering of Intellectual Value in Early Modernity, where she specialises in eighteenth-century women-authored texts in English.

Her research primarily concerns women’s literary history and old age and ageing, and her current focus is on the construction, self-perception, and reception of elderly women writers’ identity in the long eighteenth century. She successfully defended her doctoral dissertation ‘“Free from drear decays of Age”: Construction and Reception of the Authorial Self in Anna Seward’s Later Career Writings (1786-1811)’ in October 2021, which analyses the assertion of literary authority and self-presentation in the later-life writings of Anna Seward. Her other research interests include the long Eighteenth century and English Romanticism, Feminism, Gender and Queer Studies, prosopography, community, and identity.

Her research has been published in the special issue of Age, Culture and Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal; Narratives of Aging in the Nineteenth Century, in the ES REVIEW: Spanish Journal of English Studies (2019) and in the anthology Persistence and Resistance in English Studies: New Research (2018). Additionally, she authored the revised entry for Anna Seward in the Encyclopedia Britannica (2019).

As for public engagement, she has lead a bi-monthly literary seminar ever since 2018. When she is not working on eighteenth-century women writers she is reading or watching/thinking/writing about football, tv and fandom, and queer representation in the media.

For a more thorough list of publications and public speaking, see the CV page.