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Overview

Biography

I joined ����logo��� as a Lecturer in January 2001, having previously held tenure-track posts at Illinois State University and the University of California, Santa Cruz. I served as an Assistant Dean for Curriculum and Student Experience in the School of Arts from 2017-2020, when I developed a programme of employability and business engagement for the Arts. I am a founding member and part of the Steering Committee of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies (CILAVS) and was its Director from 2014-2020. I��was on the Steering Group of the ����logo��� Institute for the Moving Image (BIMI) from 2014-2020, and I am currently a member of the steering committee of the Centre for French, Francophone and Comparative Studies.�� In the Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics I was the Director of the MA/MRes Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Cultural Studies from 2014-2018, and was the Director of the MA/MRes Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies in Modern Languages from 2018 to 2022.

My research��interests are in the intersection of culture with politics and in the relationships between aesthetics, culture, politics and ideologies. The nature of my research is fundamentally interdisciplinary and it incorporates focuses on literature, philosophy, history of psychiatry, visual culture and cultural institutions and their discourses. My publications are currently concerned with the following areas of enquiry: Hispanic cultures; Cultural Studies; Exile and Migration Studies; History of Psychiatry; Medical Humanities.

During academic year 2022-2023, I held a stipendiary Fellowship at the Institute d’Études Avancées de Nantes (France), having held a Visiting Professorship (Professeur Invitée Recherche) at the Université Paris Nanterre in 2021. I have been an investigator in 4 state-funded Innovation and Development Research Projects in Spain. In 2019 I was a Consultant for Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid��in��the remodelling of their permanent collection, regarding their holdings on the art and culture of Spanish republican exile. Also in 2019 I was chosen a Member of the Spanish Comité Científico Internacional of the Comisión Interministerial para la Conmemoración del 80 aniversario del exilio republicano. I am a founding member and the president of the��Asociación de Estudios Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

I am an Expert Evaluator for the European Innovation Council-European Commission and from 2017-2023 I served as a Member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, AHRC’s Academic Peer Review College. I am part of the Advisory Committee for the Cátedra del Exilio Literario Republicano (CEXLIR) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and belong to the External Advisory Board for the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC) at the University College Cork, Ireland. I was a member of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies from 2003-2024, and currently of MVM: Cuadernos de Estudios Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Journal of Catalan Studies. I serve on the advisory board of more than twenty international refereed journals in the areas of Contemporary Spanish Cultures, Cultural Studies and Urban Studies. I have been a peer reviewer of book manuscripts for several academic publishers, including Boydell and Brewer, Liverpool University Press, University of Toronto Press, Berghahn Books, Palgrave Macmillan, University of North Carolina Press and Vanderbilt University Press.

Highlights

• Out now: .��History of Psychiatry,��46 (24), 2025.

  
  

• On 20 February 2026 I am invited to a workshop on exile and psychiatry organised by the Ateneu Tosquelles, part of the Centre Psicoteràpia Barcelona Serveis Salut Mental (CPB SSM). I will be discussing with psychiatrists and mental health practitioners the work of Josep Solanes as part of a tradition of radical psychiatrists in 1930s Catalonia and the importance of his legacy to rethink mental health treatment today in Catalonia. ��

• Out now: . Iberoamericana, Año XXV, n. 89, 2025, pp. 15-34.

• Out now:��“”. Versants. Revista Suiza de Literaturas Románicas, 2025, 72:3, pp. 17-31.��

• From 9-11 July, 2026 at the Ibero-Amerikanische Institut��in Berlin I am an invited speaker to the conference “Translocality / Transhistoricity”. I will speak about alternative genealogies of knowledge production marked by exile and marginality, based on my research on Spanish Republican exile. The conference is part of the research project “TransExil: Verhandlungen von Ästhetik und Gemeinschaft��im postrevolutionären Mexiko”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG.����

• Out now: in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spain: Ideas, Practices, Imaginings, edited by L. Elena Delgado and Eduardo Ledesma. London: Routledge, 2025, pp. 155-167.

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• Out now: .��L’Atalante. Revista de Estudios Cinematográficos, 39, 2025, pp. 23-36.

  
  

• Out��now: . Laberintos 26, 2024, pp. 39-61.

  
  

Office hours

Tuesdays, ����logo��� Central, Room 305, 3:30pm - 5:30pm, during Term time.

Otherwise, please contact me by email (m.balibrea@bbk.ac.uk) to arrange an appointment.

Web profiles

Administrative responsibilities

• Programme Director, Foundation Year, School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
• Spanish language coordinator

Visiting posts

• Fellowship, , 01 October 2022 to 01 June 2023
• Visiting Professorship (Professeur Invitée Recherche), Université Paris Nanterre, 01 May 2021 to 01 June 2021

Professional memberships

• Member, Higher Education Academy

• Member,��Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland

• Member,��Association of Contemporary Iberian Studies

Honours and awards

• Fellowship , March 2022
• Consultant Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, December 2019
• Member of the Advisory Committee Cátedra del Exilio Literario Republicano (CEXLIR), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, March 2025
• Member of the External Advisory Board , March 2025
• Member Comité Científico Internacional of the Comisión Interministerial para la Conmemoración del 80 aniversario del exilio republicano, Spain, March 2019

ORCID

Research

Research interests

• Spanish Contemporary Cultural Studies
• Spanish Republican Exile
• Exile, Migration and Diaspora Studies
• Urban Cultural Studies
• History of psychiatry
• Francoism
• Spanish Transition to Democracy
• Barcelona
• Medical Humanities

Research overview

I am a Cultural Studies scholar and currently the focus of my research is on Hispanic Exile and Diaspora studies in its intersections with history of psychiatry. While coming originally from a specialization in contemporary Spanish literature, my research interests have developed through the years towards a questioning and crossing of disciplinary and national boundaries. My work is always predicated on a critical, politically situated enquiry that aims to destabilise well-established, hegemonic ideas and to open up the possibilities for rethinking paradigms and enabling the emergence of discarded, forgotten voices and points of view. The extensive research that I have done on the cultural and political legacies of Spanish Republican exiles of the Spanish Civil War of 1939 has been a major vehicle for my development of these approaches. I argue that by relocating interventions by exile cultural practitioners within transnational and global frameworks we can better encompass these exiles’ contributions to fields from which they have been up-to-now mostly absent.

Examples of this research are “Políticas de la mística y el barroco mexicano en el cine del exilio republicano: Cantar de los Cantares (Manuel Altolaguirre, 1959)”, “‘Staple of the Contemporary Music Scene’: Roberto Gerhard in Geopolitical Perspective” or “Irrumpiendo en el presente: Estrategias de reinscripción en la Historia en la obra filosófica de Rosa Chacel” ( article links in Publications). Still, my most ambitious project within this line of research is the work I have been developing around the figure of Catalan Republican exile psychiatrist Josep Solanes, which I was able to advance thanks to a residential fellowship in academic year 2022-2023 at the . My articles and ��show how exile produces knowledge for which exile’s main characteristics –the constant moving, the marginality– are not obstacles but conditions of possibility. Defeat and precarity positions can produce pioneer, more efficient, more ambitious, more imaginative thinking, in this case in the field of psychiatry. This is a contribution to rethinking the history of mental health and psychiatry from the margins that challenges the unequal circulation of psychiatry as disciplinary practice between the Global North and South. Having so far focused on the work of Solanes, my research is widening its scope to include the trajectories of other exile psychiatrists.

Not unconnected to my work on Hispanic Exile and Diaspora Studies, I have written extensively as well on the Spanish Transition to democracy and the so-called “Pact of Oblivion”, the lack of state reparations vis à vis the population who had fought against and resisted the dictatorship. I first tackled this question in my book ��(1999), which analyses literature as a political and theoretical space of intervention for the writer as an intellectual and influential public figure. This work pioneered in the field the focus on artistic production critical of the Spanish Transition while claiming the importance of historical memory of the defeated in the Civil War, a topic that would become central to social, political, and disciplinary debates from the early 2000s around the “recovery of historical memory” question. I continue to be engaged with the study of this author’s work through the Asociación de Estudios Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, of which I am the president and one of its founding member.

My second book, ��(2007), added to the inquiry into historical memory matters by exploring the politics of historiography behind the exclusion of Republican exile cultural practitioners from Spanish national histories in the democratic period. While choosing the work of exile philosophers and writers to demonstrate the value of marginal and excluded positions to think the nation critically, this book further argues that new historiographical approaches are needed to properly study the culture of Republican exile which are not subordinated to, but rather critical of national paradigms. Tiempo de exilio has become a major reference in the field of Republican exile studies. The challenge that it poses to the field to move in new directions was taken up in ��(2017), a collective endeavour that I coordinated with contributions from more than 40 international researchers, covering multiple aspects of exile culture, and proposing innovative ways to reposition the study of exile beyond national boundaries. Since its publication, it has been recognised as another major contribution to Republican exile that identifies many new avenues for its study.

A growing interest on the “spatial turn” in Humanities and Cultural Studies led me to a new approach and object of study to explore the Spanish transitional and democratic periods, that of the city and Urban Cultural Studies.�� My articles on the “Barcelona model” (; ) and culminating with my book ��(2017), investigate the importance of culture to understand the transformation on the discourses about the city from the democratic socialism of anti-francoist grassroots activists to the neoliberalism of the global, post-Olympic city. My research on Barcelona and the creative city continues to attract the attention of urban and cultural policy and cultural studies scholars, sport sciences and Olympic Games specialists, architects, cultural geographers, cultural activists and museistic institutions.

Research Centres and Institutes

• Founding Member, Director (2014-2020), Member of the Steering Commitee,
• Member of the Steering Group (2014-2020),
• Member of the Steering Commitee, Centre for French, Francophone and Comparative Studies
• Founding member and current President,
• Member of the External Advisory Board,

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions external to ����logo���:

1

Supervisions within ����logo���:

4

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who are interested in undertaking research in any of my areas of research expertise. Please contact me by email: m.balibrea@bbk.ac.uk

Current doctoral researchers

• IRENE PRAGA GUERRO

  Nature of supervision:

  JOINT PRINCIPAL SUPERVISOR, Oct 2022

  Title of thesis:

  The 'New Migration Crónica'

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• CLAIRE DAVIES

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2018

  Title of thesis:

  A Study of the Concept and Genealogy of Home Ownership within Spain from 1950s to 2008 as represented within specific cultural artefacts.

  Description:

  Private home ownership is so central to the Spanish populace that its influence can be seen within Spanish cultural products. This is reciprocal for, in turn, the cultural products and their view on the home impact the Spanish populace. This thesis therefore examines cultural artefacts, alongside academic theories on space and the home, as a tool in order to attempt to explain the rise and continuation of the ideology of home ownership within Spain. It will use cultural artefacts to show that�� historic, economic and political events within Spain from the 1950s onwards have impacted the concept of home ownership.

  The promotion of home ownership within Spain can be traced back to 1947 when Franco’s government liberalized residency laws resulting in a mass rural exodus to the cities in search of employment. Even after Franco’s death and the transition to democracy, the focus on the construction industry and, as a consequence the need for greater home ownership, persisted. On 1 January 1986 Spain joined the European Economic Community which resulted in significant EU subsidies leading to the huge construction boom of the 1980s and early 1990s. Consequently, Spain became the country in Europe with the greatest amount of people owning their own home; 87% in 2007 (López, 2011, p. 3).��

  This thesis takes a different, and hence unique, approach to other scholars who have used cultural artefacts to illustrate the link between space and culture within Spain, in working more specifically with the idea of home ownership. Other theorists, for example Nathan Richardson and Ann Davies also used cultural artefacts to understand Spain’s complex relationship with space, but only for the period up until the 1990s and did not specifically look at home ownership.�� Therefore, the exploration of home ownership within Spain as evidenced in cultural artefacts appears not to have been attempted before.

  By expanding the period of review from the 1950s to 2008 and by concentrating on the specific concept of home ownership, this thesis encompasses events such as the Franco regime, including the end of the disastrous autarkic period and the later periods of desarrollismo and apertura, including the adoption of a capitalistic stance that was to characterize the latter half of Francoism and later Spanish governments, the transition to democracy, membership of the European Union, the construction booms of both the 1960s and late 1980s/early 1990s and the events that led into the long recession which started in 2008 and lasted until 2015, from which Spain is now recovering.. All of these events had an impact on the use of space and hence the concept of home ownership within Spain. We should therefore be able to see this impact when we review the cultural artefacts written at the time in question. In addition, by reviewing the chosen artefacts we should hopefully obtain a greater understanding as to how, why and to what extent the dominant discourse affected Spain’s populace who appeared to embrace the ideology behind private home ownership. As such, this unique approach could be fundamental in understanding Spanish society’s relationship to their homes and their hegemonic desire for ownership.

  Awarded:

  2024

• PAULA CLEMENTE VEGA

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor

  Awarded:

  2026

• EVA NIETO MCAVOY

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  A Mind of Winter? The Intellectual Exile of Arturo Barea, 1939-1957.

  Awarded:

  2017

Teaching

I regularly teach in the areas of contemporary Spanish culture (from the 18th C to the present) and cultural theory at the undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Teaching modules

• Imagining the Nation
• Exile and Nation in Modern Spain (Level 6)
• Culture and Image
• Film and Politics (Level 5)
• Memory and History
• Culture and Text: 'Imagined Communities'

Publications

External Repositories

Business and community

Media

I am happy to receive enquiries from the media on the following topics:

• current cultural and political Spanish affairs

Outreach