Narrative Lab Teams (NLT)
Who we are / what we do
NLT consists of a series of stable individual researchers and research teams constituted by experienceed researchers and students formed specifically to carry out a narrative project. At present, all projects are related with movies and series (Pixar, The Crown and Isabel). We are also experimenting with methodologies for group work (in corpora of intermediate length). We invite prospective teams to join us. We offer teaching and consultancy services to companies, educational and academic institutions.
Daniel Candel Bormann
Founder and lead researcher
Francisco Sáez de Adana Herrero
Lead researcher
Daniel Candel is full professor at the Universidad de Alcalá, where he teaches literature. He has worked on the relationship between science, history, religion and literature and evil in narrative and he has developed a tool of analysis of fiction which he has applied to fictional and non-fictional texts in multimodal environments and is now reworking into cognitive narrative thematics (Routledge, 2023). He has repeatedly published in journals such as Semiotica, Poetics Today, Style, English Text Construction or English Language and Education. He was a Fulbright at Harvard in 2016.
Francisco is full profesor of Computer Science at the Universidad de Alcalá. He is also a specialist in the world of comics, above all Terry and the Pirates. For the last years he has been the director of the Franklin Institute in Alcalá and is now holding the first chair in comics studies in Spain at the Universidad de Alcalá. He was co-lead researcher of Team 3 / Project 3.
María Ángeles Martínez
Lead researcher
Sergio Abellán García
Lead researcher
María-Ángeles Martínez is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Modern Philology, University of Alcalá. Her research is in the field of cognitive literary linguistics, narrative discourse analysis, and cognitive narratology, and her work has been published in journals such as Narrative, Language and Literature, Journal of Literary Semantics, and Poetics Today. She is the author of the monograph Storyworld Possible Selves (De Gruyter, 2018), which presents a framework for the linguistic and literary study of narrative engagement. Her current research focuses on narrative intersubjectivity, perspective and focalization, and reader response.
Olivia Serret Sanz
Researcher
Olivia Serret Sanz holds a bachelor in English Studies (2016-2020), and a master's, both from the University of Alcalá. In both cases, she graduated with honors with her final dissertation on character networks in The Godfather (bachelor) and the technical procedures unreliable narrators employ to create covert progression (Master's). She was a beneficiary of the Community of Madrid’s Scholarships for Academic Excellence for four consecutive years (2016-2020), an intern at the University’s Department of Modern Philology (2019-2020), and a beneficiary of an ‘introduction to research’ internship at the same department (2020-2021).
María Teresa Santé Delgado
Researcher
Sergio Abellán Gómez is a PhD student at the University of Acalá, where he also collaborates in the teaching and research activity of the Modern Philology department after being awarded a predoctoral scholarship by the Ministry of Education in Spain. He is currently working at the intersection between Narratology and Cultural Studies, with a particular focus on the narrative capabilities of videogames and digital media. He is a member of Narrative Lab Teams (NLT), where he contributes with his experience in mixed-method analysis by combining computational and humanistic approaches to TV and other media.
Abeer Hakami
Researcher
Abeer Hakami is working on a PhD thesis which applies the concept of storyworld possible selves to the study of the non-fictional narratives of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) patients and ex-patients in Arabic.
María Teresa Santé is doing a PhD in English Linguistics at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. María Teresa is doing her PhD thesis on aspects of the linguistic organization of characters' dialogues in fictional prose and drama in English.
Team 1
Research team 1 worked on its project from 2013 to 2017. It was composed of Daniel Candel Bormann as lead researcher, Marta Giuliani Pedraza, Slavka Madarova, Paula Rubio Cáceres, Marta Ruiz Sanz, María Victoria Troyano Fernández and Kristine Treija. At the time, and apart from Daniel, and Marta Giuliani, who was a postgraduate student, all the members were undergraduates doing translation studies at the Universidad de Alcalá. Team 1 did Project 1.
Team 2
Team 2 worked on its project from 2016 to 2020. This team was composed of Daniel Candel Bormann as lead researcher, and Emma Dávila Torres, a postgraduate student, and Efraín Perez Delgado, at the time an undergraduate doing English Studies at the Universidad de Alcalá. Team 2 is engaged in Project 2. The resulting article has been published in the Q1 journal Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2021).
Team 3
Team 3 worked on its project from 2017 to 2021. The team was led by Francisco Sáez and Daniel Candel, and also composed of Alejandro García Blanco and Sergio Abellán Gómez. Sergio is a postgraduate students and has recently been awarded a research grant by the Spanish Ministry of Education. Alejandro is an undergraduate student doing English studies at the Universidad de Alcalá. Sergio is our digital expert. Team 3 is doing Project 3. The resulting article has been published by the Q1 journal English Text Construction (2021).