The research group brings together the consolidated trajectory of researchers with decades of accumulated experience, as well as promoting the already outstanding training capacity of young researchers. The basic defining axis of this group's research is the application of the perspectives of social history and cultural history to the study of contemporary Spain. This area is approached, however, from a comparative perspective and with attention to transnational processes and phenomena, particularly in relation to Europe and Latin America. 

The research group aims to deepen the study of 19th and 20th century Spain by opening up new approaches that transcend the traditional compartmentalisation between political, social and cultural history and address in all its complexity both the transformations of contemporaneity and the study of historical subjects, both individual and collective, and their relationship with nation-states. The aim is to apply renewed perspectives to the study of the social transformations of the Spanish 19th century and their relationship with the emergence of the new institutions of the national state, to the analysis of the changes linked to the emergence of mass society in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century, and to the understanding of the changes and crises of the inter-war period, which open up the configuration of the societies of the second half of the 20th century. 

The study of these problems is based on the development of various analytical perspectives. Firstly, through the study of so-called political cultures, a concept that encompasses not only the analysis of political ideologies but also the social history of politics, forms of sociability and associated cultural practices. In this sense, the possibilities of its application to the study of the political cultures of nineteenth-century liberalism as well as the cultures linked to its questioning will be developed. For the twentieth century, the emergence of new democratic forms of mass politics and their questioning by reactionary nationalism and fascism will also be addressed. Secondly, based on a methodological approach that relates perspectives of social and economic history with the institutional analysis of politics and its cultural dimensions, the analysis of the formation of the Spanish nation-state from below will be developed. The aim is to establish a periodisation of the major stages of the relations between the national state and civil society in nineteenth-century Spain, including an analysis of the trajectory of the notion of the economic subject in the liberal public space and the discursive and political strategies with respect to individual rights and their practical realisation. The third axis is articulated around the study of individual and collective identities. On the one hand, the analytical potential of biographical history will be explored with the aim of providing a complex interpretation of experience, identity, subjectivity and representativeness, all understood as an opportunity for the joint renewal of historiography and conventional biography. It will also address the study of collective identities in 19th and 20th century Spain, paying special attention to the national dimension and the processes of construction of regional and local identities in interaction with the national framework, as well as the study of gender identities. Finally, the forms of construction of cultural representations by literary, cinematographic and artistic materials will be specifically studied, integrating them into the historical analysis. From the approaches of the most recent socio-cultural history, its role in the construction of political and social imaginaries will be addressed, as well as reflection on the relationship between history and fiction.

Contributor/ s

• Pilar Salomon Cheliz - University of Zaragoza.

University education