Klaus Zilles

My occupation as an academic scholar has principally centered on the area of Humanities, particularly on North American minority literature, Mexican American literature, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and identity politics. After my incorporation in the Facultat de Ciències de la Comunicació Blanquerna in 1999, my research has evolved, and has now shifted toward the communication media. My research now focuses on audience reception, the shift from legacy media to digital media, social media, disinformation, the influence of cognitive phenomena (metacognition, cognitive biases, resistance to belief change), the attention economy, and identity politics in the media. I graduated with Staatsexamen (equivalent to a master's degree but awarded by the state) from Heidelberg University in English and German Philology in 1992. A year-long stay at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque brought me in contact with Mexican-American writers and their novels, and I later decided to do my master's thesis on Chicano literature. Upon reading the thesis, my adviser, Professor Dr. Dieter Schulz, strongly urged me to expand it to a Ph. D. dissertation. He helped me get admitted as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where I worked as a German teacher, took classes in American Literature, and used the extraordinary library facilities to complete my bibliography for the thesis project. Returning to the Heidelberg in 1995 as a Ph.D. candidate, I won a full scholarship from the German government (Friedrich-Naumann Foundation), and in 1998 I earned my Doctorate Degree. My dissertation was published in 2001 by the University of New Mexico Press in their Southwestern Writers series, with the title Rolando Hinojosa: A Reader's Guide. In 1999 I was hired mainly as an English teacher at the Facultat de Ciències de la Comunicació Blanquerna , but soon I also began to teach doctorate courses on postmodernism and the media, and elective classes on literature in English. The foci in my research and publications are mainly concentrated in the area of literary studies, in particular US. literature (Mexican American writers), but also British literature, and literary adaptations to film and TV, mainly with identity politics as a focal point. Most of my publications and conference papers are in English, with occasional contributions in Spanish and Catalan. All my texts incorporate methodological approaches stemming from Critical Theory and Cultural Theory: postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, conceptualized and articulated by scholars such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, Frederic Jameson, bell hooks, Edward Said, Andreas Huyssen, Seymour Chatman, Linda Hutcheon, Christopher Norris, José David Saldívar, Sharon Zukin and Sherry Turkle. Apart from my first book published in 2001, I also co-edited (with Fernando Clemot), and wrote the prologue to the first anthology of Chicano Literature in Italy, entitled (Ed. with Fernando Clemot). En la frontera: i migliori racconti della narrativa chicana . Milan: Gran Vía Edizioni. 2008. In 2011, 2013, and 2015 I was co-organizer of the International Conference on Reality and Communication. Apart from co-editing the conference proceedings, I have also directed the editing processes of two English-language book containing the best conference papers, with were both published by the publishing house Peter Lang, New York. As of September 2012, the Blanquerna School of Communication was be renamed Blanquerna School of Communication and Internationa Relations . I form part of the team of teachers who will give language classes and seminars in this new degree