July 2026

Images of Difference: Regionalisms, Gender, and the Evolution of Tourism in Spain (1960-2020)

Anna Casas Aguilar is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia where she teaches courses on Spanish and Catalan literature, cinema, and culture. She is the author of Bilingual Legacies (University of Toronto Press, 2022) as well as several articles on cinema and contemporary literature from the Iberian Peninsula, which have been published in journals such as Modern Languages Notes, Journal of Catalan Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Hispanic Studies.

With the support of a Killam Faculty Research Fellowship from the University of British Columbia, she will be conducting research for her second book, Images of Difference: Regionalisms, Feminisms, and the Evolution of Tourism in Spain (1960-2020) at the Dahlem Humanities Centre. Through the analysis of interdisciplinary “texts” such as films, photographs, novels, essays, graphic novels, museum exhibitions, autobiographical materials, press articles, advertisements as well as government campaigns and citizens’ initiatives, this research addresses how tourism has been a central force in reimagining contemporary Spain and its regions.

During her time as Visiting Fellow at the Dahlem Humanities Center, Anna Casas Aguilar will carry out research in the archives and libraries of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (IAI), the Historical Archive on Tourism, and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. She will be particularly looking at the cross-cultural dialogues that emerge as the result of tourism between Spain and Germany.