Ph.D. Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University, 2017 My academic background is in literature and linguistics, which I combine with research in art and architecture. I mainly write about 1920s-1960s Spain, although keeping a transnational perspective. I am currently completing a book manuscript titled Madrid 1937. Protective Avant-Gardes and the Burial of Monuments. Taking the avant-garde protection of Madrid monuments as centerpiece, I explore the Spanish Civil War experience of the so-called “death of monuments” due to their total incompatibility with modernity. I analyze novels, poetry, vignettes, protection projects, urban plans, propaganda and other media to inquire into different forms of protection and iconoclasm during wartime, and the resulting proposals for what a “modern monument” could be. With a conceptual history approach and through the lens of literature and artistic practices, I use monuments as a peephole to try to understand the war and the radical 1930s. The manuscript discusses issues such as the relation between ornament and hunger, between monuments and the masses--the monumental scale of construction and the massive scale of political mobilization. Some authors who engaged with monuments and I analyzed in the manuscript are writers such as Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Agustín de Foxá, Arturo Barea, Ramiro de Maeztu, María Teresa León, Federico García Lorca or Dionisio Ridruejo; artists such as Josep Renau; and architects such as Fernando García Mercadal or Josep María Sert. Related to my book project, I am curating a few exhibitions: one on exiled Republican writers in the Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago; another one on experimental monuments of international communism in the Schusev State Museum of Architecture, in Moscow; and the last one on Fernando Sánchez Castillo and Josep Renau, monumentality and mass mobilization in IVAM, Valencia. Besides this central research project, I am interested in other issues such as AIDS—I wrote the blog ASS (Amor, Sexo y Serología) between 2015-2017—and psychoanalysis—In 2014, I founded the Princeton Psychoanalysis Reading Group, which in 2015 organized the conference Freud Today at the Freud Museum in Vienna. In 2016-2017, I was a Fellow of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Recent Courses in RLL
SPAN 26020 Beyond Guernica. Destruction and Preservation in the Spanish Civil War
This course studies the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) as a testing ground for the Second World War in regards to destruction and conservation, and as a key chapter in the process towards the creation of the notion of World Heritage. Picasso’s "Guernica" epitomizes the image of the Spanish Civil War as a laboratory for destruction, as it encapsulates the vanishing of the idea of refuge in the time of total war. This exceptional devastation was contested through innovative methods to sheltering people and protecting monuments and museums, turning the country into a laboratory for conservation as well. Introducing the significance of this war through the letters of American soldiers who volunteered in Spain, we will reconstruct a series of debates about destruction and conservation from different ideological stands—liberalism, fascism, communism, anarchism—that mobilized the entire population: philosophers, peasants, artists, architects, writers, workers, and the international community. Taught in English. Students seeking Spanish credit will do the readings/writing in Spanish.
Taught in English. Students seeking Spanish credit will do the readings/writing in Spanish.