David Vilaseca, who has died aged 46, after being run over by a skip lorry as he rode his bicycle near his home at London Bridge, was a professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, who specialised in Hispanic studies and critical theory. He wrote two major books and a string of brilliant articles over the course of some 20 years.
Skip lorry seems to be a sort of tow truck.
As an authority on Spanish and Catalan culture, he produced original and innovative studies of a number of writers, mostly gay, and exiles from their native land or language. Himself a proud and openly gay man who had made his life in London rather than his native Barcelona, David clearly had a personal interest in such figures. But as a master in the demanding school of poststructuralist thought, especially psychoanalysis and queer theory, he was an impeccable scholar. His central theme was that identity was unstable and the limits between self and other difficult, if not impossible, to draw. It was a theme he would also explore in a prizewinning novel.
David took his first degree in philology in 1987 at Barcelona's Autonomous University before studying for an MA at Bloomington, Indiana, in 1989. I supervised his PhD, awarded at Queen Mary, University of London, in just three years (1992), in spite of the fact that he had a full teaching load as a language assistant. He then returned to teach at his home university. Finding the British system more receptive to his research, he came back to a lectureship at Southampton University in 1994 before moving to Royal Holloway as senior lecturer in 2000 with rapid promotion to professor of Hispanic studies and critical theory in 2003.
Salvador Dalí, whose autobiography was written in several, indecipherable hands and in a macaronic mix of languages, was clearly a perfect match for David's deconstructive approach. His first book, published in 1995, was The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings. Where previous scholars had attempted to discover the "true" Dalí behind the multiple masks, David took seriously the elusiveness of identity in a subject who wrote gnomically: "There are four Dalís and the best is the fifth." Crucially, this sense of self was built on Dalí's vehement rejection of homosexuality, and of Federico García Lorca, the gay poet who loved him. The painter could thus at one moment write jokingly to Lorca as a rent boy, offering his services for a few pesetas, and at another insist dogmatically: "Let there be no misunderstanding on this point. I am not a homosexual."
Bizarre episodes in Dalí's autobiography suddenly made sense in David's subtle and sensitive readings. In one tragicomic scene, Dalí struggles with a razor blade to cut out a tick that he believes has attached itself to his back, only to discover that it is a mole, part of his own body. Self and other, inside and outside, thus prove perilously difficult to separate.
Typically, David's accounts of Spanish, Catalan and Hispanic writers could prove unsettling to scholars and activists alike. Thus, he showed convincingly that Arenas actively constructed an image of himself as a person with HIV/Aids, even as that identity was imposed upon him; and that the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo came to identify himself as a homosexual only when told as much by his mentor, Jean Genet. This was a fine example of the "hindsight" of David's title, the way in which retrospectively we build narratives of ourselves, telling tales that are never simple or single.
It was perhaps a surprise that such a private person as David should publish a novel that was clearly autobiographical in origin. L'Aprenentatge de la Soledat (The Apprenticeship of Solitude), composed in diary format, is the story of a gay Catalan living in the London which David loved. While it would be naive to take the novel as a personal revelation (David worked for years on stylistic revisions of his text), it charts with disconcerting objectivity love and sex in the capital. Lengthy and controversial, it marked David's return to the Catalan language and won him the 2007 Octubre prize for Catalan fiction.
David wrote that, as in the continuing relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, Dalí's autobiography was "part of a love story which has clearly not come to an end". This is also true of his own writing. A third academic book, Negotiating the Event, will be published this autumn.
David is survived by his mother, Marina, his sister, Marta, and the many friends who loved him.
• David Vilaseca, Hispanic scholar, born 6 February 1964; died 9 February 2010
* Paul Julian Smith
* guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 March 2010 18.45 GMT
Paul Julian Smith is the author of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Verso), Amores Perros (BFI Modern Classics) and Television in Spain (Boydell and Brewer). He is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound
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