Astur is a PhD student, recipient of the Berkeley Fellowship for Graduate Study. Born in Asturias, Northern Spain, he holds a Double Major in Political Science and Sociology from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a Master of Arts in Literary Studies from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He is especially interested in narration and its different forms as fundamental to human life, as well as in potential reflections on an on-going chronotope contraction.
From a multidisciplinary approach, his current research mainly focuses on Spain and the contemporary cultural artifacts that diverge from the traditional center of the nation. He has studied the key role of narrative action within the novels of Juan Marsé and their connections to both the Picaresca genre and the trickster trope as an example of the subaltern struggle to build an own world in the 20th Century. He also engages with a wide range of more recent cultural productions which deal with diverse, contemporary issues in Spain. As such, he addresses the artistic problematization of massive tourism and the early 2000s real estate bubble, as well as the recurrent Spanish tensions around plurinationalism, political centralism and the 1970s transition to democracy.
Astur aims at developing a research and writing project able to dim the borders between the artistic and the academic spheres, that is, between creation and critique.