Research Team
Mónica Bolufer (Principal investigator)
Mónica Bolufer is the principal investigator of CIRGEN and professor of Modern History at the Universitat de València. She has authored Arte y artificio de la vida en común (Art and artifice of life in common, 2019), La vida y la escritura en el siglo XVIII (Life and Writing in the Eighteenth Century, 2008), Mujeres e Ilustración (Women and Enlightenment, 1998), Amor, matrimonio y familia (Love, marriage and the family, 1998; with Isabel Morant). She has also published many articles on women’s writing, gender discourses, notions of politeness, sensibility and the self and travel narratives, in British, American, French, Spanish and Italian academic journals and in essay-collections such as Knott and Taylor’s Women, Gender and Enlightenment (2005) and Jaffe and Lewis’s Eve’s Enlightenment (2009). She has coedited Historia de las mujeres en España y América Latina (A History of Women in Spain and Latin America, 2005-2006), and The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment (2020; with Elizabeth F. Lewis and Catherine M. Jaffe). She is currently exploring circulation of debates on gender in eighteenth-century Europe (particularly between Spain, Italy, France, Portugal and Britain) and languages of feeling in correspondence across the Atlantic.
More information | monica.bolufer@uv.es
Isabel Burdiel
Isabel Burdiel is Professor of Contemporary History at the Universitat de València, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia (UK) and founder of the European Network on the Theory and Practice of Biography (ENTPB). Isabel Burdiel is a specialist in political and cultural history of European and Spanish liberalism of the nineteenth century. With particular emphasis on gender dimensions, she has been interested in the relationship between history and literature and the possibilities of biographical history. She is the author of the first critical editions in Spanish of Mary Wollstonecraft. Vindication of the rights of women and Mary W. Shelley. Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus. In 2011 she received the (Spanish) National History Award for her biography of Queen Elizabeth II. She has also published an extensive study about 19th-century writer Emilia Pardo Bazán.
More information | isabel.burdiel@uv.es
Carolina Blutrach
Carolina Blutrach has a degree in History of the Universidad Complutense Madrid and received her Ph.D. in History and Civilization from the European University Institute in Florence (2009). She has worked as a Juan de la Cierva Postdoctoral Researcher at the Universitat de València and has enjoyed a Postdoctoral Fellowship to Researchers and Cultural Creators of the BBVA Foundation. She works on the social and cultural history of the European aristocracy in the Early Modern period (sixteenth to eighteenth century), with a particular interest in written culture, material culture, forms and uses of memory and the history of family and gender. She is the author of the monograph El III conde de Fernán Núñez, 1644-1721. Vida y memoria de un cortesano práctico (The 3rd Count of Fernán Núñez, 1644-1721. Life and memory of a practical courtier, Marcial Pons-CSIC, 2014), editor of a special issue on El viaje y su memoria en la construcción de identidades, siglos XVI-XIX (Travel and memory in the construction of identities, 16th-19th Centuries, 2016) and co-editor with Giulia Calvi of Sibling Relations and Family History: Conflicts, co-operation and gender roles in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (special issue in the European Review of History, 17, 5, 2010), among other publications.
More information | carolina.blutrach@uv.es
María Tausiet
María Tausiet has a degree and a PhD in History of the Universidad de Zaragoza, and is a specialist in cultural history. She has studied early modern religious beliefs related to witchcraft, magic, and the Catholic Reform, addressing topics such as “the gift of tears” and the notion of immortality in scientific and fantastic descriptions of the hereafter. Her current research focuses on the relation between the notions of sensibility and gender during the Enlightenment.
In 2009 she co-edited the first book in Spanish on the history of emotions. Recently, she has directed her attention to the so-called spectral turn, the languages of allegory, and literary and cinematographic myths. Notable examples from her many publications include Venom in the Eyes. Witchcraft and Superstition in Sixteenth-Century Aragon (2000), Accidents of the Soul. Early Modern Emotions (2009), Urban Magic in Early Modern Spain. Abracadabra omnipotens (2014), Allegories. Image and Discourse in Early Modern Spain (2014) and Mary Poppins. Magic, Legend, and Myth (2018).
More information | maria.tausiet@uv.es
Ester García Moscardó
Ester García has a degree in History and a PhD degree in Contemporary History of the Universitat de València. She was awarded a predoctoral scholarship by the Ministry of Education (FPU). Her research has been characterised by the integration of cultural and biographical perspectives, paying special attention to the cultural construction of historical agents according to specific gender references. She has published articles and contributions to collective works on the role of religiosity and emotions in the formation of modern identities in the nineteenth century, among which are “Die religiöse Fundierung des Radikalliberalismus, zwischen Säkularismus und Orthodoxie. Die ,,Freiheitsphilosophie” des spanischen Publizisten Roque Barcia, 1821-1885” [Historisches Jahrbuch, 2016] and “Nación y emoción patriótica en el republicanismo español del siglo XIX” [ARCHILÉS CARDONA (ed.): No sólo cívica. Nación y nacionalismo cultural español, Valencia, Tirant Humanidades, 2018].
More information | ester.garcia-moscardo@uv.es
Laura Guinot Ferri
Laura Guinot has a degree in History and a PhD in History of the Universitat de València (2019). She has worked as a predoctoral researcher in the Institut Universitari d’Estudis de la Dona and in the Department of Early Modern History and Contemporary History of the Universitat de València, with a ValI+D contract from the Generalitat Valenciana. Her research has focused on feminine spirituality between 17th and 18thcenturies, popular religiosity and the process of sainthood construcción, as well as saint appealing from a historical and medical perspective. As a result, she has published different articles such as Mujeres y santidad: el uso del cuerpo como expresión y manifestación de lo divino. En torno a la Beata Inés de Benigànim (Women and Sainthood: the Body as an Expression and Manifestation of Divine Gifts. The Case of Blessed Inés of Benigànim, Studia Historica. Historia Moderna, Vol. 2, Nº 2, 2018). She has also worked on the history of reading practices and written culture, particularly on religious and popular literature in the early modern period. Currently, her research addresses the analysis of feminine readership and the so-called “literature for women” during 18th century.
More information | laura.guinot@uv.es
Elena Serrano
Elena Serrano is interested in exploring how knowledge, gender identities and political power are produced through the circulation of scientific objects. Her work combines methodologies from the history of science and medicine, material culture, book history and gender studies, and focuses on the long eighteenth century. She has published on a variegated of topics that included the circulation of scientific best-sellers in Spain, the role of women in prison’s reform, and the relationship of bureaucratic practices and the creation of knowledge. She is currently writing on how the relationship between the senses and emotions were conceived in the Spanish context.
Her thesis Science for Women in the Spanish Enlightenment (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2012) was awarded the Premi Extraordinari de Doctorat and the DHST Young Scholars Award of the International Union for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Elena has conducted part of her research at the University of Cambridge, the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia and the University of Sydney. In 2012, she was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, where she has been a research fellow until October 2019.
Her book Ladies of Honor and Merit. Gender, Useful Knowledge, and Politics in Enlightened Spain (in press, spring 2022) suggests that, rather than being excluded from the realms of knowledge and power during the Enlightenment, a group of influential Spanish women and reformist men sought a new political role for high-class learned women. Reformulating the ideas of female scholarship and learning as instrumental for achieving the country they envisioned, this book tells the stories of a women’s society that invested on improving poor women’s conditions; of books and journals that invested on women’s scientific education; and of women experimenting with everyday materials for the good of the motherland. It argues that, first, in some enlightened quarters, producing, applying and circulating useful knowledge in certain areas (mainly, rural economy, textile trades, education, and children’s welfare) was shaped as the feminine way to contribute to the nation-building efforts. Second, that the legitimation of women in this new patriotic role occurred in a dynamic process with male reformers, in which ideals of progress and evolving gender identities were mobilized, rearticulated, and negotiated.
More information | elen.serrano@uv.es
Blanca Llanes Parra
Blanca Llanes Parra holds a B.Sc. in Business Administration and a B.A. in History from the University of Cantabria (Spain), a master’s degree in Museum Studies from New York University and a Ph.D. from the Joint Doctoral Program in Early Modern History at the University of Cantabria and the Autonomous University of Madrid. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Valencia and the University of Cantabria. During her predoctoral training, she was a research fellow at the University of Cantabria (University of Cantabria FPI Program and Spain’s Ministry of Science and Education FPU Program). She was also a Fulbright and a Marcelino Botín Foundation grantee at NYU. In New York City she worked in the museum field at the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.
Her research interests have been focused on the study of crime, justice and social control in Early Modern Madrid. She has been involved in public history and digital humanities initiatives. Her current research project deals with gender-based violence in the city of Madrid during the eighteenth century, using a comparative approach. She has published in scientific journals such as Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos and Clío & Crímen and in collections such as Bajtín y la historia de la cultura popular (2008), Identidades urbanas en la monarquía hispánica (siglos XVI-XVIII) (2015) and, most recently, Hidden Cities: Urban Space, Geolocated Apps and Public History in Early Modern Europe (2022). To date, she has participated in three competitive research projects from Spain’s Plan Nacional I+D+i and in three European projects.
More information | blanca.llanes@uv.es
Predoctoral Researchers
María Oltra Vercher
María Oltra Vercher holds a degree in History and a master’s degree in History and Identities in the Western Mediterranean (15th to 19th C.) from the Universitat de València. She is currently working on her dissertation at the Universitat de València. Her dissertation examines the ‘querelle des femmes’ in eighteenth-century Spain, Italy and Portugal drawing on key works translated into Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, while also paying attention to the transatlantic dimension of this debate.
Marc Sorribas Vilarrocha
Marc Sorribas Vilarrocha received a degree in History and a master’s degree in History and Identities in the Western Mediterranean (15th to 19th C.) from the Universitat de València (UV). He is working on his dissertation at the UV on the circulation of information and the creation of historiographical narratives and discourses on the Haitian Revolution, within the transatlantic space between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Project Manager
Inma Aleixos Borrás
Inma Aleixos, PhD has the experience of two parallel professional trajectories – research and management – that are merged into projects such as CIRGEN.
As manager, her main concern is the efficient management of information and archival documents, as well as the achievement of short and long-term objectives. As a researcher, her main interests are the sociology of both science and scientific knowledge, social memory, digital preservation, and archives.
More information | inmaculada.aleixos@uv.es; cirgen@uv.es
Data Base Advisor
Ramón V. Cirilo Gimeno
Ramón V. Cirilo Gimeno has a BSc degree in Physics, 1993 and a PhD in Computer Science, 2015 (Universitat de València). He has been an associate professor in the School of Engineering of Universitat de València since 2002. He belongs to LISITT research group of the Research Institute on Robotics, and Information and Communication Technologies (IRTIC). His main research interests are Information Systems and Databases, and Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). He was the Spanish national representative of the e-Safety Observers Group 2005 to 2010.
Scientific Advisory Team
Sarah Knott, Barbara Taylor, Gabriel Torres Puga
Sarah Knott, Professor of Gender Studies at the Department of History. Indiana University Bloomington.
Barbara Taylor, Professor of Humanities at the School of History. Queen Mary University of London.
Gabriel Torres Puga, Associate Professor of History at the Centro de Estudios Históricos of El Colegio de México, A.C.