Fitxa persona

Isabel Gutiérrez Koester studied German and English Philology at the University of Valencia, where she completed her PhD in 2000 with a dissertation on female water myths in German literature. She received the University’s Extraordinary Degree Award as well as its Extraordinary Doctorate Award. Since 2002, she has been Associate Professor of German Philology at the Faculty of Philology, Translation and Communication of the University of Valencia and is accredited for promotion to Full Professor. Her teaching focuses on twentieth-century German literature, literature and audiovisual media, and research training.

Her research interests include contemporary German literature, travel writing, German-Spanish intercultural relations, imagology and gender studies. For more than two decades, she has been continuously involved in funded research projects and has served as principal investigator on several of them. A substantial part of her work has examined German-speaking travellers in Spain, cultural images and stereotypes, and the literary representation of Spanish spaces. More recently, her research has focused particularly on women’s travel writing and on the representations of Spain in travel accounts by German-speaking women. Within this field, she led the project “The Image of Spain and Latin America in German-Language Travel Literature” (UV-INV_AE-2635613), funded by the University of Valencia Research Service, and subsequently “Imagological Constructions of Spain in German-Language Women’s Travel Writing: A Gender-Based Systematisation” (CIAICO2022/105), for which she was principal investigator.

She is Director of RIALE – Intercultural Relations Germany-Spain (GIUV2013-078), a permanent research group devoted to cultural transfer, travel writing and intercultural representation. Her work has resulted in numerous scholarly publications, including journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes and monographs, and has been presented at national and international conferences. She has also developed sustained collaborations with European universities and research centres, with increasing emphasis on open science, knowledge transfer, and interdisciplinary and digital approaches in the humanities.

Since 2013, she has coordinated the international mobility programmes of the BA in Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Valencia. In this role, she has promoted new partnerships with European universities, staff and teaching exchanges, and initiatives within the FORTHEM European University Alliance, contributing to the development of international academic networks and collaborative teaching environments.