The European Society for the Study of English awards Professor Jacqueline Hurtley
Jacqueline Hurtley, Professor of Literature in English in the Department of English and German of the University of Barcelona, has received the Book Award for Cultural Studies 2014 conferred by the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). She has been awarded the prize for her biography Walter Starkie: an Odyssey, published in 2013 in Dublin by the publishing house Four Courts Press.
Jacqueline Hurtley, Professor of Literature in English in the Department of English and German of the University of Barcelona, has received the Book Award for Cultural Studies 2014 conferred by the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE). She has been awarded the prize for her biography Walter Starkie: an Odyssey, published in 2013 in Dublin by the publishing house Four Courts Press.
Hurtleyʼs research activity has been focussed on questions of cultural transfer. In her latest biography, Hurtley looks at the life and work of the Irish hispanist Walter Starkie (1894-1976), who has been considered both erudite and exotic. He held the first Chair in Spanish at Dublinʼs Trinity College and was the first director of the British Council in Spain; he opened the British Institute in Madrid in 1940 and Barcelonaʼs in 1943. Moreover, he wrote several travel books that Hurtley has analysed as political texts within the context of the thirties.
In 1986, Hurtley published Josep Janés. El combat per la cultura, to be followed by José Janés: editor de literatura inglesa in 1992, which was awarded the Enrique García y Díez Research Prize by the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (Asociación Española de Estudios Anglonorteamericanos - AEDEAN). Between 2007 and 2009 she coordinated the research project Transformations: translators and illustrators in the early Franco period in Catalonia (1940-1950), funded by the Government of Catalonia. She has supervised PhD theses on writers in English from the 18th century to the present day.