Laia Quílez Esteve

She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), holding degrees in Audiovisual Communication and in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature. She holds a PhD in Communication from the URV and is a member of the Asterisc Research Group. Her work focuses on the study of memory and postmemory narratives of traumatic pasts in non-fiction cinema, as well as audiovisual forms and representations from a gender perspective. She is a member of the research team for the project I+D “De espacios de perpetración a lugares de memoria. Formas de representación” (PROMETEU/2020/059), and previously coordinated the projects “Memorias en segundo grado: Posmemoria de la Guerra Civil, el franquismo y la transición democrática en España” (CSO2013-41594-P, 2014-2017) and “Articulaciones del género en el documental español contemporáneo. Una perspectiva interseccional” (PGC2018-097966-B-I0, 2019-2023), both funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities.

She has published in various national and international journals and co-edited, along with José Carlos Rueda, the book Posmemorias de la Guerra Civil y el franquismo. Narrativas audiovisuales y producciones culturales en el siglo XXI (Comares, 2017). Currently, she is coordinating issue 24 of the journal Fotocinema. Revista científica de Cine y Fotografía, which will focus on feminist documentary cinema produced in Spain in the 21st century.

In April 2023, she held the Mercè Rodoreda Chair at the City University of New York, where she taught a seminar and delivered a lecture on representations of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism in contemporary Catalan documentaries. She has also been a guest lecturer and speaker at Bates College (United States), Canterbury Christ Church University (United Kingdom), Universiteit Gent (Belgium), and MUSAC (Spain).