Directed by Dr. Susan Larson, my dissertation “Faustian Figures: Modernity and Male (Homo)sexualities in Spanish Commercial Literature, 1900-1936” argues that commercial novels and plays from early twentieth-century Spain often present male (homo)sexual characters as a point of constellation for anxieties regarding modernization in Madrid and Barcelona.  In texts by Jacinto Benavente, Josep Maria de Sagarra, El Caballero Audaz, Antonio de Hoyos y Vinent, Carmen de Burgos, Álvaro Retana, Eduardo Zamacois, and Alfonso Hernández-Catá, concerns about technological and socioeconomic change converge upon hustlers and blackmailers, queer seducers, and chaste inverts.  I examine these figures alongside an allegorical interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in Marshall Berman’s book All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982) so as to foreground their varying responses to the conditions of modern life.  They alternately market themselves in order to prosper under consumer capitalism, seduce others into savoring urban pleasures, or fall tragically to the conflicting pressures of tradition and change.  My future research will expand upon my doctoral thesis to consider the circulation of discourses about modernity and sexuality between Spain and the Americas in the decades prior to the Spanish Civil War.