Emerging project funded by the Valencian Regional Government's Ministry of Education, Culture, Universities and Employment.
Project reference: CIGE/2024/116. EMODER-GEMEI.
Duration: September 1, 2025 to August 31, 2027.
Principal Investigator: Josep San Ruperto Albert.
The project [EMODER-GEMEI] Geographies and Memories of Empire is a continuation of the EMODER project – Emotions of Modernity: Global Meanings and Senses through Gender, Empire, and Nation (17th-19th Centuries), funded by the Regional Ministry of Innovation, Universities, Science, and Digital Society, and carried out between 2023 and 2024. The main results of that project were published in the book: The Affections of the Past: Meanings of Emotions through Gender, Empire, and Nation (17th-19th Centuries), edited by Bakarne Altonaga, Josep San Ruperto, and Nuria Soriano, Madrid, Sílex, 2024.
This new project analyzes the past of the Hispanic Monarchy from a cultural history perspective, paying particular attention to the role of emotions, gender, and memory between the 17th and 19th centuries. Its purpose is to understand how these categories contributed to the construction of political discourses, social imaginaries, and forms of collective consciousness within the imperial framework.
From an interdisciplinary perspective, the research articulates scales ranging from the local to the global, integrating regional, Iberian, European, and American contexts. Through the study of emotions, relationships, and gendered meanings, as well as memory processes, the project examines how cultural representations participated in shaping values, sensibilities, and behaviors. Special attention is paid to their imperial dimension and their influence on the formation of political identities and languages.
The project seeks to offer new perspectives on the transition between the Modern and Contemporary Ages, challenging the rigid categories of traditional historiography and proposing a more complex, dynamic, and relational view of the imperial and emotional past.
Its main objective is to demonstrate how the categories of emotion, gender, and memory are useful for analyzing the ways in which empires and actors of the past legitimized or challenged historical processes such as colonization, conquest, and the construction of the idea of civilization. This involves studying how certain sensibilities were promoted, regulated, or repressed to sustain identity narratives, shared mythologies, and power structures. It also explores the processes of memorialization and the ways in which emotions shaped the relationship between past and present, contributing to the persistence or transformation of imperial imaginaries.
- Project website URL: www.emoderuv.com
