Outline biography

Alexis Grohmann was born in Thessaloniki (Greece), where he was educated at the Deutsche Schule. He gained a BA Hons. in Film & Media Studies and Spanish from the University of Stirling, a MA in Critical and Cultural Theory from the University of Wales, College of Cardiff, and a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Edinburgh with the help of a Faculty of Arts Studentship, having begun his PhD studies at the University of Cambridge, where he held a Gibson Spanish Scholarship. He has been a lecturer in Spanish (and Head of Department) at the University of St Andrews and a lecturer in Modern Peninsular Literature and Culture at Stirling. He has also worked as a Research Assistant at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of over 50 publications in the field of contemporary Spanish literature, including various books on Javier Marías, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, digression in literature or the Spanish newspaper column. He has been visiting professor and been invited to speak at, and collaborate with, a number of universities internationally (in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Italy or Latin America) and in the UK and Ireland. He has acted as external examiner at more than twenty institutions in the UK and Europe. He has given keynote addresses and speeches at the invitation of the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Spanish Ministry of Education, the Hay Festival, the Cervantes Institute or the Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo and the Fundación Santillana. Many of his activities have been reported in the mainstream press and media in Spain, the UK and beyond, and he has been interviewed by or has collaborated with newspapers and media such as the New York Times Magazine, Euronews, EL PAÍS, Cadena Ser or ABC, The Guardian, THES, the BBC, or ZDF and ÖRF. He has done consultancy work for the BBC (Hard Talk Extra) and the German publisher S. Fischer, amongst others, and produced commissioned work for other major publishers, including Penguin, Vintage/Knopf and Círculo de Lectores /Galaxia Gutenberg and Ínsula. Revista de Letras y Ciencias Humanas. He is a peer assessor for numerous academic journals and has acted as a specialist assessor for the National University of Ireland, The Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences or the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium). He is a member of the Scottish Qualifications Authority, National Qualifications Support Team for Modern Languages. Many of his projects have been funded by external bodies, including the AHRC, the British Academy and the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. Since 2008 he has been given an entry in Who’s Who in the World (Marquis, US). His most recent publications include Between Eternities, a commissioned edition of essays by Javier Marías for Penguin Books, and Las reglas del juego de Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a book-length study of the novels of Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte. In 2020 he formed part of the jury of the Premio Formentor.

He is an académico correspondiente extranjero of the Real Academia Española.

Research interests

Alexis Grohmann has written widely on the work of Javier Marías, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, the Spanish newspaper column by writers and contemporary, post-1970, Spanish narratives. He has supervised students on various topics at MA, MSc and PhD level, ranging from the critical theories of María Zambrano, Jesús Aguirre and José Aranguren, to the fairy tales of Carmen Martín-Gaite or the narratives of Javier Marías.

He is happy to supervise postgraduate work in any area of 20th- and 21st-century Spanish literature.