Campus Directory

---

Biography

Diego Espiña Barros is an associate professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. He holds a doctorate from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain. His research focuses on cultural memory, representations of trauma and political violence, and dystopian and apocalyptic narratives. Working within a transatlantic and comparative framework, his scholarship examines modern and contemporary Iberian cultures, with particular emphasis on Galician and Iberian studies. 

His current book project, provisionally titled "A Present in Combustion: Dystopian and Political Imagination in Contemporary Iberia," examines how the consensus surrounding Spanish democracy has fractured amid the period of open political confrontation that followed the 2008 economic crisis. Situated within the broader crises of neoliberalism and liberal democracy, and drawing on dystopian aesthetics and speculative imaginaries, the project argues that dystopia—far from being confined to narratives of remote futures—has become one of the most productive critical frameworks through which Iberian society reflects on the unresolved legacies of dictatorship, economic precarity, ecological collapse, political fragmentation, and crises of identity. 

His scholarly work has appeared in The Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, CuCo, Cuadernos de Cómic and Romance Quarterly. He regularly contributes to Spanish and Latin American media, including CTXT: Contexto y Acción, El Orden Mundial, FronteraD, Revista Anfibia, La Pluma, Jot Down Magazine, and Luzes.

---

---

---

Presentations/Publications/Productions

“A terra que foi: paisajes para un apocalipsis en la Galicia contemporánea.” Special Issue of Romance Quarterly: “North American Galician Studies: The State of the Art”, Eds. Danny Barreto, Arturo Meijide, Carmen Pereira Muro, Ana M. Rodríguez-Rodríguez. Forthcoming. 

“Cuando cesan los disparos. Tres miradas sobre el conflicto vasco en el cómic español.” Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, Special Issue ‘Iberian Comics and Graphic Novels in Periods of Social Upheaval (Revolutions, Dictatorships, Transitions).’ Forthcoming. 

“‘O que teño que facer pra non ter que ir o mar’. Galician Post-memory in Global Narco-fictions: The Case of Fariña.” Netflix' Spain: Critical Perspectives. Ed. Jorge González del Pozo and Xosé Pereira Boán. Routledge, 2023.  

“El día que mi padre comenzó a hablar. Trauma y memoria de la Guerra Civil Española en Un largo Silencio de Manuel Gallardo”. CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic, nº 7 2016, 88-109. 

“The (Re)construction of Memory in El Arte de Volar.” On the Edge of the Panel. Essays on Comics Criticism. Ed. Julio Cañero and Esther Claudio. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015: 230-242.  

“Apuntes a Notas al pie de Gaza. El cómic periodístico de Joe Sacco.” CuCo, Cuadernos de cómic, nº 2, 2014, 92-108.