Humanities and Communication

History and Art
Research proposals 3. History and Art Researchers Research Groups
 
A global history of China’s international relations.
 
This is a project dealing with the history of China’s relations with other countries. The proposals should have a global history approach and focus on the contemporary period (19th, 20th, 21st centuries). Two streams of research are particularly encouraged: 1) China-Spain relations during the late 1930s; 2) The Cold War and the beginnings of China’s economic reform in the late 1970s.
 
ALTER
 
Economic and business history of China.
 
Research proposals on the economic and business history of China are welcomed. The candidate should have skills in Chinese and an interest in developing a research career focused on China’s economic and/or business history. Proposals can cover the 19th, 20th or 21st centuries and extend into the Greater China area. The candidate should have an interest in reading secondary sources in different languages and examining primary sources (from digital or presential archives, if possible, in China).
ALTER

History of Non-Hegemonic Art: Contemporary art, curatorship, museology and coloniality

Research proposals around contemporary art and curatorship studies examining art history concepts beyond the scope of Euro-American axis. This entails an approach based on art and politics, but also postcolonial studies, examining the persistence of the colonial difference and possible reparation strategies. Additionally, we welcome research that, whether in the field of art or not, seeks to understand how Western epistemological thought works to understand the persistence of coloniality in our academic field.

Dr. María Iñigo Clavo

Mail: minigoc@uoc.edu

ALTER

Latin American Art (with a special emphasis on Brazil)

Research efforts focusing on art in Latin America and/or specifically on Brazilian art with regard to the social, colonial and political history of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Racism and latency in colonial power relations. Art and dictatorship. Art and curatorship, etc. 

Dr. María Iñigo Clavo

Mail: minigoc@uoc.edu

ALTER

Otherness, discourse, colonialism, post-colonialism and globalization in China

Research on the configuration of discourses around concepts such as otherness, modernity and interculturality in the colonial and postcolonial world of East Asia, particularly China and Sinophone, from the standpoint of modern and/or contemporary history.

Dr. David Martínez Robles

Mail: dmartinezrob@uoc.edu

ALTER

Personal and professional networks in the processes to construct and expand the Francoist elites, 1959-1975

The need to modernize and open the economy in Francoist Spain aided the expansion of a specialized bureaucracy, able to develop the plans to stabilize the situation. To ensure it reached throughout Spain, efforts were made to involve local and regional elites so as to achieve a certain level of capillarity, consensus, collaboration, communication and synergy in terms of their interests. Close collaboration between local leaders and members of the regional administration led to solid relational networks that reinforced, often thanks to family ties, both general and particular social, economic and political interests.

These new elites worked as agents implementing the dictatorship's reformist directives and, simultaneously, became spokespeople and messengers for provincial needs and concerns. Finally, these groups contributed to capturing talent, to professionalizing apolitical staff, to reintegrating individuals who had been punished during the initial post-war period and, in some cases, to bringing modern, international trends to the regime. This led to a consolidation and expansion of the leading elites and, likewise, ensured the survival of Francoism. The aim of this thesis proposal is to identify these kinds of relations, decode the mechanisms behind the links between the different sectors involved, and reconstruct the relational networks arising during the period of deasrrollismo.

Dr. Jaume Claret

Mail: jclaretmi@uoc.edu

Dr. Joan Fuster-Sobrepere

Mail: jfusters@uoc.edu

Dr. Marc Gil Garrusta

Mail: mgilgar@uoc.edu

Dra. Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora

Mail: jpujadasmo@uoc.edu

Regiocat

A history of education in Catalonia and Spain during the contemporary period 

Education has been one of the political and ideological battlegrounds of contemporary Catalonia and Spain, part of the confrontation between reformist and conservative models. From primary school to university, there has been a succession of opposing models with regard to education policies, teaching theories, curricula and the organization of teachers. This research aims to examine some of these episodes, which have affected – and still affect – our educational history.

Dr. Jaume Claret

Mail: jclaretmi@uoc.edu

Regiocat

Inequality across generations along the industrialization in the area of Barcelona, 19th – 20th centuries

Research on current and past societies has shown how high levels of socioeconomic disparity hamper the levels of social mobility and make intergenerational inequality persistent across generations. Barcelona and its hinterland along the 19th and 20th centuries constitute an extraordinary test bench for all those questions due to their significant levels of economic inequality.  The area of Barcelona showed an early industrialization process since the end of the eighteenth century. Moreover, a replacement of the elites was observed, the nobility lost its prominence, which was largely capitalized on by the liberal professionals, army officers, and public office holders. However, large traders were the group that shows a higher wealth accumulation during that period. Besides, this area faced an early fertility decline within the southern European regions and until the end of the nineteenth century the inheritance system was based on the impartible inherence. All these factors would contribute to reduce the within-family inequality and to increase of inequality between families due to wealthy families would have been able to invest more in their descendants to avoid downward mobility and consequently stopping upward mobility of members of less wealthy families. Therefore, the aim of this doctoral project will be to determine the processes of intergenerational transmission across generations for the entire social spectrum along with the industrialization in the area of Barcelona.

Dr. Joana Maria Pujadas-Mora

Mail: jpujadasmo@uoc.edu

Dr. Jaume Claret Miranda

Mail: jclaretmi@uoc.edu

Dr. Joan Fuster-Sobrepere

Mail: jfusters@uoc.edu

Dr. Marc Gil Garrusta

Mail: mgilgar@uoc.edu

Regiocat

Regionalisms and national projects under Franco's dictatorship

The goal is to explore the continued existence and influence of more or less specific forms of regionalism within the margins of legality and permissiveness existing between 1939 and 1975, based on ascertainment of their active and continued participation in the building of the Spanish State. The aim is to analyse the importance of regionalist discourses and practices in the process of political-cultural reconstruction of the different territories and in the configuration and development of Spain during the second half of the twentieth century.

Dr. Jaume Claret Miranda

Mail: jclaretmi@uoc.edu

Dr. Joan Fuster-Sobrepere

Mail: jfusters@uoc.edu

Dr. Marc Gil Garrusta

Mail: mgilgar@uoc.edu

Regiocat

Town councils and municipal powers during Franco's regime 

Following the Spanish Civil War, Franco's victorious regime built a new administration based on the political cleansing of existing workforces and offices and the appointment of new staff, to ensure loyalty and the enforcement of its political mandates. This transformation encompassed the country's town and city councils, key institutions of the state given their proximity to the general public, powers, staff and social control. Future research must allow us to gain a better understanding of both the process of destroying the Republican institutions and policies and the construction (and subsequent transformations) of the new regime's power at a local level.

Dr. Marc Gil Garrusta

Mail: mgilgar@uoc.edu

Regiocat

Alto de la Cruz, archaeology and gender: gender studies in the protohistory of the Iberian Peninsula

Progress in archaeological and protohistoric research from the 20th to the 21st centuries has been highly positive, with the incorporation of new data analysis and interpretation tools. Nevertheless, in the Iberian Peninsula, the required inclusion of a gender perspective in this analysis has been far more limited in scale.

In the case of the protohistoric settlement of Alto de la Cruz (Cortes, Navarra) which has been and still remains a historical and archaeological benchmark, both nationally and internationally, for understanding changes and developments in society in the first millennium BCE throughout the entire Ebro Valley and the Iberian Peninsula, this gender perspective is urgently called for and needs to provide the keys to understanding interpretations of developments in the protohistory of the Iberian Peninsula.

Research into the site at Alto de la Cruz, was crucial in the positioning of Spanish archaeology in the mid-twentieth century. The permanent exhibition at Alto de la Cruz, opened in October 2017, provides a snapshot of the work carried out between the 1940s and the 1990s.

In the case of Alto de la Cruz, a working team has been created to deal with and analyse the site from a gender perspective.

 

http://altocruz.blogs.uoc.edu/

http://www.ub.edu/grap/index.php/linees-de-recerca/alto-de-la-cruz-las-claves-de-la-protohistoria-europea

Dr. Glòria Munilla

Mail: gmunilla@uoc.edu

 

The historiography of Iberian Peninsula archaeology: Alto de la Cruz and the birth and development of protohistoric studies in the Iberian Peninsula

Alto de la Cruz is a first millennium BCE settlement defined as a fortified Oppidum and located on the right bank of the River Ebro. It boasts an absolute stratigraphic sequence that bears uninterrupted witness to the life of its population between the Bronze Age (about 1100 BCE) and the Second Iron Age (around 350 BCE), and also reveals the evolution of the Iberian Peninsula as a whole over the same period.

On a historiographical level, the site can be analysed in three key phases:

  • Its discovery, which led to its national and international début, due to its chronological and cultural significance; Alto de la Cruz became a representative in the Iberian Peninsula of the cultural world of the Indo-Europeans or the Urnfield culture, so named due to its burial practices.
  • The first archaeological excavations of the 1950s and their scientific positioning on a national and an international level.
  • The phase during the 1980s and 1990s, with the latest archaeological work and the use of research technologies that were innovative for their time.

This means that Alto de la Cruz played a key role in European protohistory in the Iberian Peninsula. In addition, it helps explain developments in research methodology there from the middle of the twentieth century to date as well as its relationship with research methods on an international level. It helps us understand the role played by researchers analysing the historiography of archaeology and protohistory, both nationally and internationally.

http://altocruz.blogs.uoc.edu/

http://www.ub.edu/grap/index.php/linees-de-recerca/alto-de-la-cruz-las-claves-de-la-protohistoria-europea

 

Dr. Glòria Munilla

Mail: gmunilla@uoc.edu

 

A history of education in Catalonia and Spain during the contemporary period 

Education has been one of the political and ideological battlegrounds of contemporary Catalonia and Spain, part of the confrontation between reformist and conservative models. From primary school to university, there has been a succession of opposing models with regard to education policies, teaching theories, curricula and the organization of teachers. This research aims to examine some of these episodes, which have affected – and still affect – our educational history.

 

Dr. Jaume Claret

Mail: jclaretmi@uoc.edu

Regiocat
History of Art and Visual Culture in the Spanish State. Art, Culture, and Modernity under Franco's Regime
 
This research line aims to address the various ways in which manifestations related to Modernity (avant-gardes, modern architecture, cinema, and various expressions of mass culture) coexist, resist, or are driven by the organs of the Francoist regime. This approach proposes to carry the historical cultural analysis into the Spanish context of Francoism in its various socio-political stages: autarky, developmentalism, and late Francoism. It also aims to explore chronologies, artists, peripheries, and media that are less examined in order to highlight issues linked to complex dichotomies such as the relationship between fascism and modernism; or modernity and regionalism, avant-garde and traditionalism or classicism; or processes of rupture and continuity in artistic modernity between the pre-war and post-war periods,... etc.

Dr. Ana Rodríguez Granell

Mail: arodriguezgrane@uoc.edu

Dr. Muriel Gómez Pradas

Mail: mgomezpr@uoc.edu

Regiocat
 
Art, Science, Technology, and Society (ACTS)
 
Research proposals focusing on the interrelations between art, science, technology, and society (ACTS) from historical, theoretical, methodological, and practical perspectives, or a combination of these mentioned aspects. Special attention will be given to approaches from the archaeology of media, social studies of science and technology applied to the arts, as well as philosophical approaches of new materialisms. At the same time, structural research on the ACTS ecosystem as a whole will be welcomed.
 

Dr. Pau Alsina

Mail: palsinag@uoc.edu

DARTS 

Art and education

Research about the theories and practices connecting the fields of art and education, with emphasis on critical perspectives. Possible subject areas: teaching theories, specific contexts (school, museum, community, etc); education and culture policies, the history of art education, social impact, etc.

Dr. Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín

Mail: asanchezdeserdio@uoc.edu

 

Collaborative arts practices

Research about artistic manifestations based on collaboration between different players (be they artists, support staff, collaborators or the general public). Focus will be placed on the negotiations, tensions, partial agreements, and political implications in general of the processes of collective artistic production.

Dr. Aida Sánchez de Serdio Martín

Mail: asanchezdeserdio@uoc.edu