Visiting Faculty Research Scholar Sara Santamaría Colmenero (Aarhus University) at Hofstra University’s Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice

Sara Santamaría Colmenero is a postdoctoral researcher from the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University (Denmark). She has been involved in different projects on how contemporary Spanish society deals with controversial and violent pasts. She studies the public uses of the colonial past and the ways in which memories of violent pasts are constructed and transmitted within Spanish and colonized societies. Her current project analyses the cultural memories of Spanish imperial past in West Africa (specifically in Equatorial Guinea) compared to the memories of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. This project combines the fields of memory studies and postcolonial theory in order to examine how narratives about colonial pasts reproduce racial regimes of representation and neocolonial discourses. The project is co-founded by the Danish Council for Independent Research and the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development.
In the framework of her project, she was a visiting research scholar at the Center for “Race”, Culture and Social Justice at Hofstra University for two months, in November and December 2017. She chose Hofstra as her host institution because of Benita Sampedro Vizcaya’s expertise in Spanish Colonialism in Africa, and the efforts led by the Center to promote and disseminate research on the social and cultural constructions of “race”. Sara benefited from the assets and resources of the Center. During her research stay, she took part in the scholarly meetings organized by the Center, where she exchanged views and resources with members of the Advisory Board and fellows, with a central focus on the intersection of analytical categories like “race”, gender, “class” and sexuality. Currently, she is curating an international conference, organized by El Born Cultural and Memorial Center of Barcelona City Council, on the continuities and discontinuities between the European colonial pasts and current neoliberal Europe. Her upcoming publication will acknowledge Hofstra’s Center for “Race” for their contributions to her scholarship development.


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