Reimagining History in Contemporary Spanish Media: Theatre, Cinema, Television, Streaming

Instituto Cervantes in Manchester and Leeds, in collaboration with the Durham University, introduce the second edition of "Ex Libris: Publications in Hispanic Studies", coordinated by Professor H. Rosi Song (Durham University), to promote new publications about Hispanic Studies.

First session: Reimagining History in Contemporary Spanish Media: Theatre, Cinema, Television, Streaming by Paul Julian Smith.

This book offers a new perspective via the visual culture of the reimagining of history for contemporary Spanish media audiences. It gives close readings of major recent texts in a number of media (theatre, cinema, television, and streaming) that have yet to receive scholarly attention and are closely connected to each other. And it stresses the intermodality of the visual by calling attention to connections between those media and others, such as painting. From Picasso to the Javis and from the classic serial to Netflix, this book shows how Spanish history is radically reimagined through recent visual culture.

Paul Julian Smith is an internationally recognized scholar of Spanish and Mexican cultural and media studies and critical theory. He is the author of more than 22 books and over 100 academic articles. He is a Distinguished Professor at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He has been Visiting Professor in universities in the US and Spain, including Stanford, NYU and Carlos III, Madrid. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2008. As a critic for British Film Institute's Sight and Sound magazine, Smith has established himself as a world scholar on the films of the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. His book Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Verso, 1994, 2000 and 2014) is one of the most widely read books on the filmmaker. Among his books are Writing in the Margin (Oxford University Press, 1988), The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000), Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, Fashion, Art, and Film (Polity, 2003), Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester University Press, 2007). His books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish. His more recent research focuses on Mexico, including a book on Amores Perros (BFI, 2003) and has served as a juror at the Morelia Film Festival in 2009 and at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2013.