# Raquel Vega-Durán Faculty Chair of Ethnicity, Migration & Rights Senior Lecturer in Peninsular and Transatlantic Film and Literature Formerly Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures at Claremont McKenna College ![Raquel](/sites/g/files/omnuum8296/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-04/headshot.jpeg?itok=RENbpGT9) location\_on Boylston 325 smartphone [(617) 496-4433]() email **Research Interests:** Migration and Border Studies; Transatlantic Cultural History and Literature; Peninsular Spanish Cultural Studies; Film and Media Studies; Mediterranean Crossings; Gender Studies; Digital Humanities; Narratives of Identity, Memory, Forgetting, and Exile; Intersections between Art and Literature; Global Mobility; Transnational Cultural Products. **Academic Degrees:** B.A. in British and American Studies, Universidad de Sevilla (Spain); Certificate of Graduate Studies in Film Studies, University of Michigan; Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan. --- **Publications:** **Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain**. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2016. *Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migrants, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain* offers a new approach to the cultural history of contemporary Spain, examining the ways in which Spain’s own self-conceptions are changing and multiplying in response to migrants from Latin America and Africa. The book proposes that Spain is evolving into a new space of the imagination, one that can no longer be defined without the migrant—a space in which there is no unified identity, but rather a new self-understanding is being born. This book introduces the reader to a wide range of recent films, journals, novels, photography, paintings, and music to reconsider the complexity of contemporary Spanish identity through its varied encounters with migrants. *Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders* both places Spain in a larger European context and draws attention to some of the features that, from a comparative perspective, make the Spanish case interesting and often unique. --- **Selected Reviews:** *Revista de Estudios Hispánicos* by Christian Ricci () *Representing Migration Humanities Lab* by Anna Tybinko () **In-Progress:** **Vanishing Europe: Abandoned Villages and the Repopulation of Europe in the Twenty-First Century***.* This book will have an online companion to visually map out both the depopulation and the current initiatives to repopulate European villages. --- **Selected Articles:** - "Me Di Cuenta El Otro Día Que Era China Y No Lo Sabía": La Hibridación Cultural De Quan Zhou Wu.” *ConSecuencias*, Fall 2022. - “Recording the Invisible: “Porteadoras” and the Spanish-Moroccan Border in Documentary Film,” *21st Century Arab and African diasporas in Spain, Portugal and Latin America*, edited by Cristián Ricci (New York, Routledge, 2022), forthcoming. - “Una España más allá de sus fronteras: emigrantes, inmigrantes y la ciudadanía española global,” *Política Exterior,* July-August 2022, forthcoming. - “Punishing Women Through Narrative: The Challenges of Scientific Authority in Spanish Film,” *Women and Science in Spanish Literature,* edited by Debra Faszer-McMahon and Victoria L. Ketz (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2021): 350-370. - “Hacia una empatía humanitaria: refugiados y activismo en España,” in *Todos a movilizarse: Protesta y activismo social en la España del siglo XXI*, edited by María José Hellín García and Ana Corbalán Vélez (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2019): 153-165. - “Tales of Two Shores: The Re-Establishment of Dialogue Across the Strait of Gibraltar,” in *African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts: Crossing the Strait*, edited by Debra Faszer-McMahon and Victoria L. Ketz (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015): 131-144. - “Street, City, and Region as Global Contact Zones: Glocalized Self-Identities and Stereotypes in the Graphic Novel *El Nord*,” in *Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain: Local Cities, Global Spaces*, edited by Ana Corbalán and Ellen Mayock (Newark, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2014): 75-88. - “United Spains? North African Immigration and the Question of Spanish Identity in *Poniente*,” *Afro-Hispanic Review* 32:1 (Spring 2013): 159-180. --- **Book Review:** Review of *Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain*, by Samuel Amago and Matthew J. Marr, eds, *Hispanófila*, summer 2021. ## Courses Taught ### Spring, 2026 [### SPANISH 122 - Spanish Film from Buñuel to Almodóvar ](/class/spanish-122-spanish-film-bunuel-almodovar) **Semester:** Spring | **Year offered:** 2026 - ## Department Role [Faculty](/people/role/faculty) [Spanish Faculty](/people/role/spanish-faculty) - ## Language [Spanish](/language/spanish) - ## Research Interest [Literature](/research-interest/literature) [Film](/research-interest/film) [Digital Humanities](/research-interest/digital-humanities) [Gender and Sexuality](/research-interest/gender-and-sexuality) [Media Studies](/research-interest/media-studies)