Eduardo Sánchez Palencia participates in the 10th ASYRAS Conference “Bridges across Academia: On Sharing Knowledge” (Murcia, 2025)
The 10th conference of the Association of Young Researchers on Anglophone Studies, which was held at the University of Murcia from 21 to 23 May 2025, brought together a large number of young scholars who had the opportunity of sharing their outstanding research studies.
The conference was composed of three simultaneous panels on literature, cultural studies and linguistics, and featured plenary sessions by Dr Pascual Cantos Gómez (University of Murcia), Dr Juan Francisco Belmonte Ávila (University of Murcia) and Dr Laura Monrós Gaspar (University of Valencia). Thus, ASYRAS is notable for being multidisciplinary and for creating spaces for young researchers who are at the beginning of their academic careers.
Eduardo Sánchez Palencia, one of the members of our associate research team, participated in the conference with a presentation titled “The Demythologisation of Spain’s National Hero: A Study of Thomas Roscoe’s Interpretation of Spanish Ballads and the Cid.” The paper analyses the way in which Thomas Roscoe’s portrayal of the Cid in his series of travel books The Tourist in Spain evolves from an idealised conception of his chivalric qualities to a demythologised representation of the knight as an antagonistic character with antiheroic features. Furthermore, the study explores to what extent Roscoe’s perception of the Cid was conditioned by the works of other authors such as Robert Southey, John Gibson Lockhart and Felicia Hemans.
Therefore, the paper, which is part of the LHIBRO II research project, sheds light on the role that nineteenth-century British Hispanists played in the propagation of ideas and opinions about the Cid and the literary influence that their works had on Roscoe’s own interpretation of the Spanish hero. Moreover, it aims at understanding the different ways in which early British Hispanists were involved both in the reception of Spanish literary texts about the Cid and in the construction of a romanticised image of Spain.
Eduardo’s participation in the conference has allowed researchers from different Spanish universities to know the work that is being undertaken by the LHIBRO II team, and it has hence contributed to the dissemination of knowledge, which is one of the principal objectives of the research project.
