Ana Fernández-Cebrián

Ana Fernández-Cebrián is an assistant professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures. Her research focuses on the historical shifts pertaining ideological production and the transformations of the public sphere in modern and contemporary Spain, with a special emphasis on literature, cultural studies, film, and media. She earned her B.A. in Hispanic Philology from Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, and her Ph.D in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University.

Her book Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) (Liverpool University Press, 2023) focuses on a basic paradox: why is it that the so-called “Spanish economic miracle” —a purportedly secular, rational, and technocratic process— was fictionally portrayed through narratives in which providential or supernatural elements were often involved? In order to answer this question, this book examines cultural fictions and collective social life at the time —the 1950’s and 1960’s— when Spain turned from autarky to industrial and tourist development. 

Her second book project, tentatively entitled Land and Water: Literature of the Commons in Modern and Contemporary Spain, studies the relationship between nature, political and literary imagination, and communitarian experiences. Other research and teaching interests include the impact of the accounts of progress, modernity, and scarcity on the expectations of a social majority in the current economic crisis.

Selected Publications

• Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) (forthcoming, Liverpool University Press, 2023).
• “Pueblos de agua: Territorios hidrosociales en la España contemporánea.” Espacios y límites de la (in)justicia en la España contemporánea. Mónica López Lerma (ed.) Granada, Comares (Forthcoming)
• “Spain, Europe: 1977-2003.” Roberto Bolaño in Context. Cambridge University Press. Ed. Jonathan Monroe (2023).
• “Roots Under the Water: Dams, Displacement, and Memory in Franco's Spain (1950-1967).” A Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies. Luis I. Prádanos (ed.). Woodbridge, Tamesis (2023).
• “Exposed Intimacies and Domestic Spaces: Bedrooms in Spanish Cinema (1939-1960).” Comfort and Domestic Space in Spain since 1900. Susan Larson (ed.) University of Toronto Press (Forthcoming).
• “Catorce tesis sobre el fascismo obsolescente.” Co-authored with Víctor Pueyo Zoco. Revista Pensamiento al Margen 16 (2022).
• “Executioners and Cultures of Capital Punishment in Franco’s Spain (1959-1975).” Rite, Flesh, and Stone: The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture, 1959-2020. Vanderbilt University Press. Antonio Córdoba and Daniel García-Donoso (eds.) (2021).  
• “Visiones del desarrollo. El pabellón de España en la Feria Mundial de Nueva York 1964-1965 y su producción audiovisual.” Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies 2.1. (2020). 
• “La voz de Vox o a qué suena el posmofascismo.” El Cuaderno. Cuaderno Digital de Cultura, (2019): https://elcuadernodigital.com/2019/07/13/la-voz-de-vox-o-a-que-suena-el-posmofascismo/            
• “Retablos de maravillas: ficciones contra el marketing de Estado y memorias democráticas del ‘92 en la coyuntura de la crisis en España.” Journal of Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film, 3 (2016-2017).
• “Domesticidad e imaginarios del consumo en el cine español: El inquilino (1957), La vida por delante (1958) y El pisito (1959).” Revista Hispánica Moderna 69.1 (2016).
• “El circo de las ondas: Radio y vanguardia en Ramón Gómez de la Serna.” Líneas de Fuga 34, Laboratorio de Vanguardias (2014).
• “Tener y no tener: lecturas de Sancho Panza en la dictadura de Primo de Rivera (1923-1930).” Co-authored with Víctor Pueyo Zoco. Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 33.1 (2013).