Neus Penalba holds a PhD in Literature, awarded by Universitat de Girona (Spain) and a MA in Literary Theory from Université Paris-Diderot (Paris-VII, France). Her research and teaching activities center on contemporary Iberian literature and culture, with a focus on Catalan contemporary literature. She is a specialist in the work of the Catalan novelist Mercè Rodoreda and she has studied the aesthetic elements in Rodoreda’s posthumous novel, Death in Spring, using European 20th ethnofiction in literature and cinema and the pictorial primitivism of the avant-garde. In her current book project, she studies narratives of extinction in Iberian literatures, analyzing how the representation of ecosystems and cultural loss are interlaced in the works of many Spanish, Galician, and Catalan authors. Neus has previously taught at Université Vincennes-Saint Dennis (Paris-8) and Université Lumière-Lyon 2, in France; at Reed College in the United States; at Université de Montréal in Canada and, in Spain, at Universitat Rovira i Virgili and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.