María Ferrández–Sanmiguel is associate professor at the Department of English and German Studies (University of Zaragoza, Spain), where she teaches US Literature and Critical Commentary of Literary Texts. She graduated in English Studies at the University of Zaragoza in June 2010, receiving the Extraordinary Degree Award “Gregorio García-Arista”. 
In April 2017, she received her PhD cum laude after defending her thesis, written under the supervision of Prof. Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, and for which she obtained the “Félix Martín Award” to the best PhD thesis in American Studies (granted by the Spanish Association for American Studies). María has also been an Academic Visitor at the University of Northampton (2014) and Michigan State University (2016).
Her present research focuses on contemporary US fiction and ethics, with special attention to issues of trauma and the posthuman in speculative fiction. She is the author of Trauma, Gender and Ethics in the Works of E.L. Doctorow (Routledge, 2020). Her most recent essays include Mourning the Human? Posthuman Death and Ontological Vulnerability in Jeff VanderMeer’s The Southern Reach Trilogy” (International Journal of English Studies, 2024) “Toward an Ethics of Affinity: Posthumanism and the Question of the Animal in Two SF Narratives of Catastrophe” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2022), “Resilient Cyborgs: Trauma and the Posthuman in Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991)” (Extrapolation, 2021) and “Ethics in the Anthropocene: Traumatic Exhaustion and Posthuman Regeneration in N. K. Jemisin’s The Broken Earth Trilogy” (English Studies, 2020). She has recently guest co-edited a special issue of the European Journal of American Culture, titled “Recent Reflections on the Posthuman Condition in American Literature and Culture” (2024), and her co-edited volume The Posthuman Condition in 21st Century Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Insights is currently in press (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025).
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4402-0815