Diego Baena received his PhD. from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University in 2020. He also holds a BA in History and Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. Prior to his doctoral studies, Dr. Baena worked for a year as a bilingual tutor with Chicago Public Schools.

His dissertation, entitled “La literatura y sus pueblos: demopoéticas de la España liberal (1834-1854) [Literature and its Peoples: the Demopoetics of Liberal Spain, 1834-1854],” explores the intersection between popular literacy, various forms of popular media, censorship, and dissident political cultures in nineteenth-century Spain, with a special focus on the era of liberal rule known as the Período Isabelino. His principal focus as a researcher has been on republican, “utopian” socialist, or otherwise anti-establishment authors and political cultures from the 19th and early 20th centuries, and on forms of popular media ranging from the folletín novel, to the popular theater of the género chico and the largely anonymous forms of “minor” graphic and performed literature known as literatura de cordel.

While one part of Dr. Baena’s research to date has focused on representations of urban and transatlantic migration, popular education, knowledges, and working-class caring economies in the works of Emilia Pardo Bazán and Rosalía de Castro, his more recent endeavors seek to question the perceived relationship between, on the one hand, what is generally called ‘Literature’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, on the other, what is broadly called “popular” or “mass” culture, seeking also to disquiet the at-times arbitrary distinctions that have tended to be imagined between so-called “high” and “low” aesthetic and political forms.

Dr. Baena is currently preparing publications on the Madrid bohemian literary scene and on the intersection of cholera pandemics and working-class revolts in mid-nineteenth-century Spain. He has also published in the Madrid-based cultural magazine, CTXT.