The RIALE research group from the Universitat de València participates in the first episode of a new dissemination podcast focused on the foreign women travellers who visited Spain between the 19th and the 20th centuries, and who left testimony of their experience in stories, diaries and travel books. This inaugurating episode is focused on the perspective of German and Austrian travellers, and it features professors Ingrid Ingrid María García Wistädt, Isabel Gutiérrez Koester, and Mireia Vives Martínez, researchers at the Universitat de València and specialised in travel literatura and German-speaking culture.
During the interview, the researchers analyse how these authors built a unique perspective of Spain through their trips across the country, paying attention to traditions, landscapes, historical-artistic heritage, and daily life of that period. The dialogue values the literary, historical and cultural interest of some yet unstudied texts and reclaims the need for recovering female voices that contributed to shape the European image of Spain during 19th and 20th centuries.
The podcast is included in a dissemination project organised by the professors of English Phylology Alberto Egea Fernández-Montesinos and María Losada Friend from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, focused on recovering and spreading biographies and testimonies of women travellers from the United Kingdom, United States, France, and Germany. The initiative combines interviews, informative pills and unreleased materials to approach the general public to some historical figures that, despite the value of their writings, remained nearly forgotten until now.
This series of dialogues arises out of the interbational symposium held on March 2026 at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville entitled “La España de las viajeras extranjeras en lengua inglesa, francesa y alemana (1840-1940): visiones novedosas sobre diversidad territorial, género y la España vaciada” (‘The Spain of foreign women travellers in English, French and German Languages (1840-1940): new perspectives on territorial diversity, gender and depopulated Spain’). The meeting gathered specialists from different universities to discuss on Spanish representations in female travel literature and son new perspectives related to gender, territorial diversity and cultural memory.
On a quarterly basis, the programme establishes itself as a new platform for scientific transfer and dissemination regarding travel literature written by women.
The participation of female researchers from the Universitat de València in this initiative reinforces the commitment of RIALE to research dissemination aimed at recovering female voices and alternative narratives within contemporary literary and cultural studies.
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