Kyle Thomson

Ph.D Student (Romance Languages & Literatures)

ksthomson@berkeley.edu

  • Fall 2023: TBA

Kyle came to Berkeley via UC Santa Cruz, where he graduated with honors with an individually designed degree in Romance Language Studies. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Romance Languages and Literatures Program with a Designated Emphasis in European Studies and a Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

His dissertation project, “Unresolved Pasts: Constructing a Postcolonial Cultural Memory in Contemporary Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese Literature,” focuses on under-acknowledged voices in contemporary Spain, Italy, and Portugal. His dissertation addresses what Ann Stoler has called “colonial aphasia”—a term which aims to capture the broad occlusion of national colonial histories by hegemonic political apparatuses—in these European countries. Traditionally considered—to varying degrees—to be among the ‘minor’ European colonizing powers from the nineteenth century on, these three countries are united by twentieth-century transitions from dictatorship to democracy which shaped the memory culture in these countries today. It is precisely the American-influenced grand récit of the triumph of democracy over dictatorship (in all three cases), paired with an institutional desire to accede to the European Union (in the Iberian cases) and the European imagined community—to cite Benedict Anderson—which led to the occlusion of the narratives my dissertation uplifts. I examine both literary texts, namely Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono (2010), Igiaba Scego and Rino Bianchi’s Roma Negata (2014), António Lobo Antunes’s As naus (1988), and Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio’s Hija del camino (2019), and large-scale cultural events (World Expositions held in my countries of focus during the 1990s) to untangle the memory knots which, though individual to each country, knot the same rope.

Kyle has taught a wide variety of courses at Berkeley, including language courses in Spanish (I, N3), Italian (I, IV, 1S for Romance Speakers), and French (II). He’s also served as a discussion leader for sixty students in the Italian Studies department’s Italian Culture survey course. Finally, Kyle taught both halves of Berkeley’s introductory writing requirement (R5A & R5B) in Fall 2019 and Summer and Fall 2022. Based on similar themes, the most recent iteration of the course is entitled Casa stregata: Haunted Spaces and Spooky Places in Spanish and Italian Literature & Culture. This course combines postcolonial, spectral, and memory studies in an examination of a variety of primary texts from Giovanni Verga to Julio Llamazares, with an emphasis on the unresolved spectral nature of Fascism and colonialism in contemporary Spain and Italy.

Kyle’s research has benefited from numerous fellowships, including a Fulbright/FLAD Open Study Award to conduct research on the 1998 Lisbon World Expo in 2021-2022 and two UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies research fellowships in 2023 (University of Münster and a St. Andrews). He was honored to receive the Giampiccolo Prize for Excellence in Italian Studies in 2022.

Kyle is also interested in second language education, the formation/maintenance/revision of collective identities (national and otherwise), tourism studies, the literary portrayal of space and spatial experience, contemporary Southern Europe, and Memory Studies.