The Team

Sally Faulkner

Principal Investigator

Sally Faulkner is Professor of Spanish (1933) at the University of Cambridge. She has published widely on Spanish cinema and TV, Portuguese film, and Film Studies. She is the author of Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema (Támesis-Boydell & Brewer, 2004, Spanish translation Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2023), A Cinema of Contradiction: Spanish Film in the 1960s (Edinburgh UP, 2006; expanded Spanish version, Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2022) and A History of Spanish Film: Cinema and Society 1910-2010 (Bloomsbury Academic 2013; Spanish translation Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2017), studies that have framed this national cinema within questions of aesthetics and intermediality, politics and dissent, and social mobility and the middlebrow. Her latest monograph, The Cinema of Cecilia Bartolomé: Feminism and Francoism, is forthcoming with Manchester UP in 2024. She is Principal Investigator of the international research project ‘Invisibles e insumisas / Invisíveis e insubmissas: Leading Women in Portuguese and Spanish Cinema and Television, 1970-1980,’ funded by the British government through an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant, with Nuria Triana Toribio (University of Kent, U.K.) and Hilary Owen (University of Oxford, U.K.).

Hilary Owen

Co-Investigator

Hilary Owen is Senior Research Fellow in the Sub-Faculty of Portuguese at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Professor of Portuguese and Luso-African Studies at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Mother Africa, Father Marx. Women’s Writing of Mozambique, 1948-1992 (Bucknell University Press, 2007), co-author with Cláudia Pazos Alonso of Antigone’s Daughters? Gender, Genealogy and the Politics of Authorship in 20^th-century Portuguese Women’s Writing, (Bucknell University Press, 2011), and co-editor with Anna M. Klobucka of Gender, Empire and Postcolony. Luso-Afro-Brazilian Intersections (Macmillan, 2014), with Mariana Liz of Women’s Cinema in Contemporary Portugal (Bloomsbury, 2020) and with Claire Williams of Transnational Portuguese Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2020). She works on feminism, gender and postcolonial theory in Portuguese and Lusophone African literatures and film.

Núria Triana Toribio

Co-investigator

Núria Triana Toribio is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kent. She is an established scholar on the areas of national cinema and popular culture in Spain. She has worked in the universities of Manchester and Liverpool, before joining Kent in 2012. Her main research is in the fields of popular culture and subculture (Spanish Punk) and film cultures.

These two interests are linked by her longstanding interest in inclusions and exclusions, particularly of women, in histories of cinema and popular culture more broadly. This has taken her to areas such as national cinemas, popular genres and auteurism; the study of film festivals; contemporary Hispanic film cultures; film criticism and popular music.

Her latest monograph is Spanish Film Cultures (2016, bfi/Palgrave). She is the author of Spanish National Cinema (Routledge, 2003) and co-author of The Cinema of Álex de la Iglesia (Manchester University Press, 2007). She is also co-editor of the series ‘Spanish and Latin American Filmmakers’ for Manchester University Press.

Her most recent work has appeared in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Lectora, and Hispanic Research Journal.

Olivia Glaze

Post-Doctoral Research Assistant (Portugal)

Olivia Glaze earned her DPhil from Wadham College, University of Oxford (UK). Her research is focused on post-imperial Portuguese literature and gendered depictions of trauma suffered during the Colonial War and decolonisation period. More broadly, Olivia works on female authorship, photography, and autofiction, with a long-standing interest in the gendered experiences of post-dictatorship Portugal.

Olivia has previously worked as a Retained Lecturer and Tutor at the University of Oxford, and as a Guest Lecturer at Queens University, Belfast.

Mariana Freijomil

Post-Doctoral Research Associate

Mariana Freijomil holds a PhD in Communication from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona). Her doctoral thesis focuses on spatial representation in historical recreations in the framework of contemporary European cinema and how this representation articulates the historical discourse. She is a part time associate professor at the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona, in the Department of Media, Communication and Culture and Professor of Visual Culture at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She is a member of the Research Unit on Early Cinema (GROC) at the Universitat de Girona (Spain), co-director of the online magazine Cinergia Revista and collaborates on other magazines focused on cinema and visual arts.

Jara Fernández Meneses

Former Post-Doctoral Research Assistant (Spain)

Jara Fernández Meneses earned her Ph.D from the University of Kent (UK). Her research focuses on the political economy of contemporary Spanish cinema and Spanish popular culture. She has published in the peer-reviewed journals Secuencias. Revista de Historia del Cine, Film Studies, Studies in European Cinemas, New Cinemas. Journal of Contemporary Film, Hispanic Research Journal, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Quarterly Review of Film and Video as well as several chapters in edited books for the San Sebastian International Film Festival, Las Palmas International Film Festival, Seminci.Valladolid International Film Festival, Nosferatu, Peter Lang and Tirant Lo Blanch.

She previously worked as an Associate Lecturer at the University Carlos III of Madrid and at the University of Kent. She is a member of the editorial board of the Film Section of Modern Languages Open (University of Liverpool). She conducts her current research in two international research groups: TECMERIN (Televisión-cine: memoria, representación e industria) of the University Carlos III of Madrid and “DeVisiones. Discursos, genealogías y prácticas de creación visual contemporánea” of the University Autónoma of Madrid.

Rachel Beaney

Former Graduate Research Assistant

Rachel Beaney is a PhD student at the University of Exeter and Cardiff University. In 2016, she was the recipient of a scholarship from Cardiff University and completed a research masters, with a dissertation focused on the child in contemporary Spanish horror cinema. In 2018, she began her PhD thesis on the orphan child in contemporary Spanish cinema, supervised by Professor Sally Faulkner and Dr. Ryan Prout. She is pursuing doctoral studies thanks to a grant from the South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Linda Williams

Advisory Board Member: Spain

Linda Williams is a Professor of Film in the English Department at Exeter University. She teaches on post-classical American cinema, British cinema and classical Hollywood. She has written five books and edited or co-edited several others, including The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema (the first book on this important post-classical genre), Contemporary American Cinema (co-edited with Michael Hammond), as well as books on psychoanalytic critical and cultural theory, and on D. H. Lawrence, feminism and visual culture. She has always worked on gender and culture, and has a longstanding interest in representations of sexuality and the history of censorship and classification. She is completing a study of children and childhood in Spielberg entitled Steven Spielberg’s Children. She was engaged in a major 4-year research project on contemporary women filmmakers, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, entitled Calling the Shots: women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000-2015. She has been involved in film exhibition and curation for a decade.

Concepción Cascajosa Virino

Advisory Board Member: Spain

Concepción Cascajosa Virino is senior lecturer at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where she is a member of the research group TECMERIN and head of the Department of Communication and Media Studies. She has written or edited nine books, including A New Gaze: Women Creators of Film and Television in Democratic Spain (2015), Dentro de El Ministerio del Tiempo (2015) and La cultura de las series (2016). Her work about television fiction and media history has appeared in journals such as Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture.

Fernando Ramos Arenas

Advisory Board Member: Spain

Dr. Fernando Ramos Arenas is Associate Professor (tenured) at the Department of Art History at Complutense University in Madrid. At Complutense University he directs the research project Film Culture in Transition. He has a strong international background: from 2010 to 2017 he was assistant professor at Leipzig University, Germany, where he earned his Ph.D. in 2010 and directed the project Cinephilia under the dictatorship. He has been Marie Curie fellow and in 2017-18 he was Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University, Washington DC. He has published two monographs on film authorship and on European film cultures (2011 and 2021), edited three volumes and written more than thirty chapters in books and articles in leading research journals such as Screen, The Historical Journal of Film Radio and Television, Medien & Kommunikationswissenschaft, Media History, Hispanic Research Journal and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, mainly on the topic of film culture, media theory and history.

Abigal Loxham

Advisory Board Member: Spain

Dr. Abigail Loxham is Senior Lecturer in Hispanic Film Studies at the University of Liverpool. She has a PhD from the University of Cambridge and has worked as a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the Universities of Manchester and Hull and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. She has published on Spanish and Catalan cinema and television with a focus on memory, national identity, gender and feminism. Her monograph Cinema at the Edges: New Readings of Julio Medem, Bigas Luna and Jose Luis Guerin is published by Berghahn Books. She is currently working on a co-authored monograph, with Prof. Anja Louis, Sheffield Hallam, on Feminism and Femininities in Spanish TV Drama (under contract with Palgrave MacMillan) and co-editing a volume on Gender and TV in Iberia and Latin America (under contract with Bloomsbury). She is working on a larger project on mediating feminism in contemporary Spanish popular culture. (https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/languages-cultures-and-film/research/projects/mediating-spanish-women/)

Annette Scholz

Advisory Board Member: Spain

While working for several years in the organization of the International Film Festival in Mannheim-Heidelberg, she finished her studies in Spanish, French Philology and Media. In 2000 she arrives in Spain to carry out her research on contemporary Spanish cinema, a topic on which her doctoral thesis is based. She is the founder of the Spanish Film Festival in Tübingen-Stuttgart, co-founder of the CineForum association and a member of the organization of the first Ibero-American cinema exhibition in Passau. She also collaborated with the Spanish and Latin American film festivals in Hamburg and worked with different distribution companies from Chile. She participated in several international digital distribution projects, including the Lisbon Village Festival. Since 2006 she has worked as international coordinator at ALCINE – Alcalá de Henares Film Festival / Comunidad de Madrid, while continuing her researches on Spanish cinema. In 2016 she co-edited the third volume of the series Aproximaciones a las culturas hispánicas (Vervuert): El cortometraje español (2000-2015). Tendencias y ejemplos. She edited the fourth volume of the same collection “Cineastas emergentes. Mujeres en el cine del siglo XXI”, on the situation of women filmmakers in Spain and Latin America, and has just finished the book “Entrevistas a creadoras del cine español contemporáneo. Millones de cosas por hacer”, co-edited with Elena Oroz, Mar Binimelis and Marta Álvarez. She is president of the association MYC. Women and Cinema. (https://mujeresycine.org/)

Raquel Rato

Advisory Board Member: Portugal

Raquel Rato was born in Covilhã, Portugal in 1971. After completing undergraduate degrees in Film Directing (for which she obtained two Merit Scholarships and a Merit Award for best finalist on the Course) and in the field of Socio-Cultural Animation she acquired a Master’s degree in Audiovisual Studies and Advertising in 2007, from the University of Salamanca. In December 2013 she was awarded her PhD in ‘Cinéma et Audiovisuel’ from the University of Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle. In Paris she also took a number of masterclasses in her specialist area of photography directing, working with renowned directors of photography. She is the author of: La Lumière dans le Cinéma: L’oeuvre d’Acácio de Almeida comme directeur de la photographie. Since 2014 she has been a research fellow at the IHC, the Institute of Contemporary History, in the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (FCSH) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she is working on Audiovisual and Oral Histories of Portuguese Cinema and has published her work in international peer-reviewed journals. Since 2019 she has been the Academic Coordinator of the project: Palavras em Movimento: Testemunho Vivo do Património Vivo do Património Cinematográfico / Words in Motion: Living Testimony of Cinematographic Heritage, which was granted a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation funding award in 2019, IHC FCSH – NOVA FCT. Site: https://www.palavrasemovimento.com In the last two years she has served on the film funding award committees for ICA (Instituto de Cinema is Audiovisual). She makes documentaries and essay films.

Ellen W. Sapega

Advisory Board Member: Portugal

Ellen W. Sapega is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her publications include articles and book chapters on Portuguese modernism, memory, visual culture and commemoration since the late 19^th century, and the contemporary Portuguese novel. She has published two monographs: Ficções Modernistas (Lisboa, ICALP) and Consensus and Debate in Salazar’s Portugal (Penn State UP), and is currently working on a book on visual and literary representations of Lisbon, Portugal, during the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Mariana Liz

Advisory Board Member: Portugal

Mariana Liz is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, in Portugal. She completed a PhD at King’s College London in 2012 and taught at King’s, Queen Mary and the University of Leeds in the UK before moving to Portugal in 2016. She is the author of Euro-Visions (2016), editor of Women’s Cinema in Contemporary Portugal (with Hilary Owen, 2020) and Portugal’s Global Cinema (2018), among other publications.

Luís Trindade

Advisory Board Member: Portugal

Luís Trindade has a PhD in Contemporary History, from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He currently teaches in the Arts Faculty and is the Deputy Coordinator of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Coimbra. He has also taught at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research is in the field of Cultural History, with a particular interest in the histories of nationalism, the press, the revolutionary process of 1974-5, cinema, neorealism, popular music, and intellectuals in 20th-century Portugal. His publications include: O Estranho Caso do Nacionalismo Português. O Salazarismo entre a literatura e a política, in 2008, and Narratives in Motion. Journalist and modernist events in 1920s Portugal, in 2016.

Raquel Freire

Advisory Board Member: Portugal

Raquel Freire was born in Oporto, a child of the 25 April Revolution. She is a writer, a screenwriter, a filmmaker, a producer, a citizen and a mother. Her films Rio Vermelho, Rasganço, Veneno Cura, SOS, Esta é minha cara and Dreamocracy premiered at International Film Festivals such as Venice, Turin, São Paulo, Montreal, Gwanju, Leeds, Clermont-Ferrand, Vila do Conde and Porto PosDoc, among others as well as in cinemas and on television in Portugal and France. They also sold out on DVD. She won a European young producer’s award from the European Film Foundation at the Cannes Film Festival. She made her stage debut when she created the show NóSOUTRXS (in which she also took an acting role) at the Teatro Municipal São Luiz. Her book TransIbericLove was published in 2014 and also sold out. In 2016 she published the short story “Azul Escuro” in the collection Do branco ao negro, which also came out in a German translation launched at the Frankfurt International Book Fair in 2017. She has worked as a visiting lecturer at various universities in Portugal and abroad, in the areas of gender studies, art and political science, cinema, acting for the camera, and film directing. She was a guest artist on the ALICE Project in the CES (Centro de Estudos Sociais) at the University of Coimbra where she made Pela mão de Alice, a documentary about Boaventura Sousa Santos. She brought the film/show Happy Island, which she made with La Ribot and the “Dançando com a Diferença” dance troop, to the Geneva Festival in 2018. Her film Mulheres do Meu País premiered at MAAT (Museu de Arte, Arquitetura e Tecnologia) in 2020 along with the animated film of the same name, co-directed with Tainá Maneschy. Her documentary trilogy, Histórias das Mulheres do Meu País aired on RTP1 in 2021. She is currently working on Mulheres de Abril for 2023. She was successful in obtaining competitive funding from the CNC (Centre National du Cinéma Français) for script-writing support for her fiction feature film, TransIbericLove. A new edition of the book on which this film is based is due out in 2022. She is also now completing her third fiction feature film, entitled Filme Sem Câmara. www.raquelfreire.com

Caterina Cucinotta

Advisory Board Member: Portugal and Spain

Caterina Cucinotta is an Advisory Board Member, with a special focus on costume and set design, and on Portuguese and Spanish comparatist perspectives. She is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary History at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where she coordinates the research group “Cultures, Identities and Power”. She was awarded her PhD. in Film Studies from Nova de Lisboa in 2015 and she has very wide experience both in lecturing and in practical costume design in films. She is the author of A Trip to Cinema via Film Costume (2018) and of the visual essay “De la femme” (2021) among other publications. She is a member of the editorial board (vídeo-essay section) for Eikon. Journal of Semiotic and Culture (Universidade de Beira Interior). Her research is in the field of Costume Studies, with a particular interest in histories from below the line, the material turn in Film Studies and the gender question behind the camera.