Margot Versteeg

Over the years I have developed a passion for the Hispanic 19th and early 20th centuries. It´s a time when everything is in flux. Just think of all the profound changes brought about by industrialization, decolonialization,  modernization, new ways of transportation, urban growth, circulation of newspapers and magazines, leisure industry, mass culture… And a literature that tries to make sense of all these changes…. Nowadays familiar concepts – such as social justice, women’s rights, gender violence, and migration – are equally relevant in this period.

My current book project, Divas and Chorus Girls: Women, Art and Commerce in nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Spain, focuses on the figure of the female performing artist. The cultural production of 19th and early 20th century Spain is obsessed with dancers, singers, and other female performers. In Spanish fiction, poems, (auto)biographical writings, and plays produced between 1845 and 1936 by both male and female authors, numerous often very talented women sing, dance, and act. Divas and Chorus Girls aims to theorize the stories of these fictionalized women within a larger story, a tradition of female performance artists as represented in Spain’s long 19th century. A series of interconnected discourses are projected on the bodies of these female performers, such as gender ideology and ideas about feminine self-realization and women’s participation in celebrity culture. But female performance is also a crucible for a whole range of larger questions raised by the processes of social and cultural change that we associate with modernity. These concerns, that are the focal point of my book, are related to art and commerce, body, and nation, to mention only a few. And that’s not surprising: female performers catered to an emerging mass culture market, developed marketing strategies, and they used their bodies to negotiate ethnic, racial, and national identities as they participated in modernity’s mobility and circulated in transnational networks.

My fascination with the 19th and early 20th centuries has resulted in three books and two co-edited volumes

• De fusiladores y morcilleros: el discurso cómico del género chico, Rodopi 2000);
• Jornaleros de la pluma (Iberoamericana/Vervuert 2011);
• Propuestas para (re)construir una nación: el teatro de Emilia Pardo Bazán (Purdue UP, 2019);
• Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (MLA 2017, with Susan Walter);
• Imagined Truths: Realism in Modern Spanish Literature and Culture (University of Toronto Press 2019, with Mary Coffey).

I have published numerous book chapters and scholarly articles on 19th and early-20th century literature and culture in, among others: Anales Galdosianos, Romance Quarterly, Gestos, España Contemporánea, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Hispania, Journal of Iberian and Latinamerican Studies, ALEC, Hecho teatral, and Siglo Diecinueve.