Thursday, February 11, 2021, 2:00pm EST
This event was ONLINE and in SPANISH with captions

This discussion sought to address the all-too prescient topic of how both sociopolitical and socioeconomic crises have tended to intersect with epidemics historically, and how they tend to be read and remembered (or no) over time. Our goal was to analyze and discuss representations and discourses of contagion of both past and present so that they may illuminate one another, and to seek a broader critical understanding of the moment of crisis we are currently living.

Diego Baena (PhD, Princeton U., 2020) is KJCC Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU, whose research to date has focused on popular political cultures and popular reading cultures in 19th and 20th- century Spain. He has written at-length on Jacobinism, utopian socialism, 19th-century popular media, and on the works of authors such as Rosalía de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Benito Pérez Galdós. His forthcoming scholarly publication “Revolt in the Time of Cholera: Plague, Inequality, Scapegoats and Insurrection in 19th-Century Spanish Fiction” addresses the cultural and political impact of the cholera epidemics of 1834 and 1854 within the context of both the liberal-jacobin and industrial revolutions.

Santiago Alba Rico (1960, Madrid) is a writer and essayist, collaborator in numerous newspapers and magazines in Spain, including: Público, Cuarto Poder, CTXT, Ara, and El País. He is the author of many books, including Las reglas del caos: apuntes para una antropología del mercado (Anagrama 1995), Islamofobia. Nosotros, los otros, el miedo (Icaria 2015), ¿Podemos seguir siendo de izquierdas? (Pol·len 2015), and Ser o no ser (un cuerpo) – (Seix Barral, 2017). In the 1980’s, he was a writer for the popular children’s TV series: La bola de cristal (1984-1988). He has recently published articles on the 19th-century Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós and his representations of the cholera epidemic of 1834 in Madrid.

With the support of NYU Department of Spanish and Portuguese