Roberto del Valle Alcalá holds an MA from the University of Essex and a PhD from the Autonomous University of Madrid (2010). His research deals primarily with British working-class literature, Cultural Studies, Marxist and post-Marxist theory, utopianism, and the history of the British Left. He is also interested in the fictional representation of capitalism and economic phenomena, with a particular focus on labour.

Del Valle Alcalá is the author of two monographs: British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism (Routledge, 2019). He has also co-edited the volume The Cross-Dressed Caribbean (University of Virginia Press, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Studia Neophilologica on the topic of economic inequality as a literary problem (2020).

His articles have appeared in Rethinking Marxism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Journal for Cultural Research, Cultural Critique, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Textual Practice, College Literature, Genre, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Culture, Theory and Critique and Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism, among other journals.

Between 2015 and 2019 he led the project ‘Inoperative Fictions: Worklessness and British Literature from Romanticism to the Great Recession’ (Swedish Research Council).

He is currently working on a new monograph exploring the tensions between utopian discourse and radical politics in British literature since the 19th century and is also completing a chapter on Robert Tressell for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature.

Del Valle Alcalá is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Class & Culture and has served as an external project reviewer for The National Science Centre of Poland.