Sara Santamaría

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Independent Researcher, Molins de Rei
Biography and/or project

I am an independent post-doctoral researcher concerned with Memory Studies, Cultural History and the Theory of History. Between 2008 and 2011 I was enrolled as a PhD fellow at the University of Valencia (Department of Contemporary History). In my PhD dissertation “Word as Event: Second Republic, Civil War and postwar period in Spanish Contemporary Literature (1990-2010)”, defended July 2013, I have studied the representations of Spanish difficult past as developed by a set of Spanish left-wing writers in their novels, essays and public activities. The methodology used consisted of a contextualizing discourse analysis of the discourses which negotiate the cultural memory of the Civil War and Francoism. I have analyzed the conceptions of history, memory, witness, truth, nation and the transition to democracy, among others, which these writers promote, and the interaction of present, past and future they establish in their works. Thus, I have examined the relations of ethics, politics and aesthetics in connection with the “culture(s) of memory” in Spain. As a historian I study the interaction between texts and contexts on the basis of the discursively mediated character of experience, formulated by Joan Wallace Scott. At present, I am interested in the public uses of colonial past in European societies and the ways in which the memory of violent colonial past is constructed, processed and transmitted within the European Union.