Arnau Sala Sallent

Arnau Sala Sallent is a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures (LAIC) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) at Columbia University. He earned a B.A. in Spanish and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

His dissertation, A Strait of the Avant-Garde: Spain, Morocco, and the Transcolonial Imagination (1898–1936), examines how writers, artists, and intellectuals resisted colonial narratives of expansion into Morocco after the crisis of the Spanish Empire. Drawing on literature, caricature, photography, and film, his research explores how colonialism in Morocco shaped new aesthetic and political imaginaries on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. By underscoring Spain’s “transcolonial imagination,” he argues that metropolitan anti-colonialism—the resistance to empire from within imperial centers—must be studied alongside Spain’s internal nationalist discourses.

Arnau’s broader research interests include modernism, intellectual history, and the intersection of mass culture and religion in the 19th and 20th centuries. His research has been published in Hispanic Review, Anuario Lope de Vega, and Laberintos: revista de estudios sobre los exilios culturales españoles. He has recently published a critical edition of the youth memoirs and war diary of the Catalan journalist Joaquim Ventalló, La guerra que jo he vist, sent as a recruit to the Rif War. 

At Columbia, Arnau has taught Hispanic Cultures I and II, Elementary and Intermediate Spanish, and has served as Teaching Assistant for Topics on Climate Discourse. Beyond the US, he has taught Comparative Literature and Literary Theory courses at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.