We are delighted to share that our team member Lucía Bennett Ortega has successfully defended her doctoral thesis, Posthuman Disabled Ontologies in Richard Powers’ Fiction, supervised by Dr. Miriam Fernández Santiago at the University of Granada.
This milestone marks the culmination of years of dedicated research supported by a highly competitive FPU fellowship awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. Lucía’s dissertation offers an innovative examination of disability, embodiment, and posthuman subjectivity in the fiction of contemporary American novelist Richard Powers, contributing to ongoing debates in critical posthumanism, disability studies, and literary criticism.
Lucía graduated in English Studies from the University of Granada in 2020, receiving the Extraordinary End-of-Degree Distinction. During her undergraduate studies, she was awarded a Departmental Collaborative Grant funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. She subsequently completed a Master’s degree in English Literature and Linguistics before obtaining an FPU fellowship to pursue her doctoral research.
Throughout her academic career, Lucía has demonstrated an exceptional commitment to research and international collaboration. She has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Glasgow and at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she carried out a six-month research stay funded by a Fulbright Scholarship.
Her research interests include critical posthumanism, disability studies, feminist criticism, and contemporary literature. Her work has appeared in prestigious journals, including English Studies, Alicante Journal of English Studies, and Atlantis. Since September 2024, she has also served as Young Scholars Coordinator of the Spanish Association of American Studies (SAAS), contributing to the development of emerging scholars in the field.
Lucía’s successful defense represents not only a remarkable personal achievement but also an important contribution to the growing body of scholarship exploring the intersections of literature, disability, and posthuman theory.
We warmly congratulate Dr. Lucía Bennett Ortega on this outstanding accomplishment and wish her every success in the next stage of her academic career.