Romana Radlwimmer (Frankfurt): “Book Launch Lavapiés liegt am Meer. Historische Poetik eines Madrider Stadtviertels [Lavapiés by the Sea. Poetics of a neighborhood in Madrid]” | Transoceanic Exchanges

Tuesday, 20 January 2026, 2pm-4pm CET
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum, room HZ 8

Co-organised by Prof. Dr. Nadia Butt and Prof. Dr. Barbara Alge, funded by ZIAF.

The lecture series is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures.

Romana Radlwimmer (University of Frankfurt)

This book launch deals with oceanic imaginaries in Lavapiés, a neighborhood community of the Spanish capital. Since the transfer of the court to Madrid in 1561, maritime imagery has pervaded the literatures on this central district. Images of the ocean, which the sea-less metropolis always longed for, continue to elevate the district until the present day; they determine the way in which Lavapiés is anchored in cultural memory as a paradigmatic space of social and political engagement. Lavapiés by the Sea re-reads novels, stories, plays, poetry and the arts of Madrid from the perspective of the working-class district and its maritime ideas. This shifts the view to dynamically undulating spatial configurations and flowing urban identities that shape the historically evolved poetic inventory of the district.

Bio Note:
Romana Radlwimmer is Professor for Romance Literatures at the Goethe University of Frankfurt. She is the author the ocean-centered monograph Lavapiés liegt am Meer. Historische Poetik eines Madrider Stadtviertels, among other books. She is director of the VW-funded projects Pandemics and Coloniality: Biopolitical Entanglements in Early Modern Chronicles and COVID-19 Narratives and Archives of Colonial Dis/Possesion: Centering Non-European Perspectives on Wealth (15th–18th Centuries). Her research interests include maritime and urban literatures of the Iberian Peninsula, and 16th–17th century Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Literature, and contemporary Latin American literatures and theories.