Available thesis proposals:
- A Global History of China's International Relations
- A History of Education in Catalonia and Spain during the Contemporary Period
- Alto de la Cruz, Archaeology and Gender: Gender Studies in the Protohistory of the Iberian Peninsula
- Archaeology of the Ancient Mediterranean
- Art, Science, Technology, and Society (ACTS)
- Art History and Visual Culture in Spain. Art, Culture, and Modernity under Franco’s Regime
- Artistic Research in Interactive and Immersive Media
- Artistic Research: Post-Media Languages and Transdisciplinary Practices in Context
- Economic and Business History of China
- Intergenerational Inequality during Industrialization in the Barcelona Area, 19th - 20th Centuries
- Latin American Art (with a special focus on Brazil)
- Media history and cultural studies of technology
- Non-Hegemonic Art History: Contemporary Art, Curatorship, Museology, and Coloniality
- Otherness, Discourse, Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Globalization in China
- Personal and Professional Networks in the Construction and Expansion of Francoist Elites, 1959-1975
- Regionalisms and National Projects under Franco's Dictatorship
- Town councils and municipal powers during the Franco Regime
- Transdisciplinary artistic research
| Thesis Proposal 3. History and Art | Researchers | Research Group |
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This project focuses on the history of China’s relations with other countries. The proposals should adopt a global history approach and focus on the contemporary period (19th, 20th, 21st centuries). Two research lines are particularly encouraged: 1) China-Spain relations during the late 1930s; 2) The Cold War and the beginnings of China’s economic reform in the late 1970s.
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Email: cbraso@uoc.edu
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ALTER |
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Research proposals on the economic and business history of China are welcome. Candidates should have Chinese language skills and an interest in pursuing a research career focused on China’s economic and/or business history. The proposals may cover the 19th, 20th, or 21st centuries and extend to the Greater China area. The candidate should be interested in reading secondary sources in different languages and examining primary sources (from digital or physical archives, if possible, in China).
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Email: cbraso@uoc.edu
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ALTER |
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Research proposals are welcome on contemporary art and curatorial studies that examine art history concepts beyond the Euro-American axis. This involves an approach based on art and politics, but also postcolonial studies, examining the persistence of colonial difference and possible reparative strategies. In addition, we welcome research that, whether in the field of art or not, seeks to understand how Western epistemological thinking operates to understand the persistence of coloniality in our academic environment.
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Email: minigoc@uoc.edu |
ALTER |
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Research efforts focused on art in Latin America and/or specifically on Brazilian art in relation to social, colonial, and political history of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Topics may include racism, latent colonial power relations, art under dictatorship, and curatorship, etc.
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Email: minigoc@uoc.edu |
ALTER |
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Research on the construction of discourses around concepts like otherness, modernity, and interculturality in the colonial and postcolonial world of East Asia, particularly in China and the Sinophone sphere, from the perspective of modern and/or contemporary history.
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Email: dmartinezrob@uoc.edu |
ALTER |
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The need to modernize and open up the economy in Francoist Spain led to the expansion of a specialized bureaucracy capable of developing plans to stabilize the situation. Efforts were made to involve local and regional elites to ensure capillarity, consensus, collaboration, communication, and synergy in terms of their interests. Close collaboration between local leaders and regional administration members led to strong relational networks, often reinforced by family ties, which supported both general and particular social, economic, and political interests.
These new elites acted as agents implementing the regime’s reformist directives and simultaneously became spokespersons and messengers for provincial needs and concerns. These groups contributed to talent recruitment, professionalized apolitical staff, reintegrated individuals punished during the immediate post-war period, and, in some cases, brought modern and international trends into the regime, thus ensuring Francoism’s survival. This thesis proposal aims to identify such relationships, decode the mechanisms behind these connections among the various sectors involved, and reconstruct the relational networks that emerged during the developmental period.
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Email: jclaretmi@uoc.edu Email: jfusters@uoc.edu Email: mgilgar@uoc.edu Email: jpujadasmo@uoc.edu |
Regiocat |
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Education has been one of the political and ideological battlegrounds in contemporary Catalonia and Spain, part of the confrontation between reformist and conservative models. From primary school to university, there has been a succession of opposing models regarding educational policies, teaching theories, curricula, and the organization of teachers. This research aims to examine some of these episodes that have affected—and continue to affect—our educational history.
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Email: jclaretmi@uoc.edu |
Regiocat |
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Research on past and current societies has shown how high levels of socioeconomic disparity hinder social mobility and perpetuate intergenerational inequality. Barcelona and its surroundings during the 19th and 20th centuries provide an extraordinary case study for these issues due to significant levels of economic inequality. This area showed early industrialization from the late 18th century. Additionally, there was a replacement of elites: the nobility lost its prominence to liberal professionals, army officers, and public officials, while large merchants accumulated the most wealth during this period.
This area also experienced an early decline in fertility rates within Southern Europe, and until the late 19th century, the inheritance system was based on non-heritable property. These factors contributed to reducing inequality within families but increasing inequality between families, as wealthy families could invest more in their descendants to prevent downward mobility and, consequently, block upward mobility of members from less wealthy families. The goal of this doctoral project is to determine the processes of intergenerational transmission across the social spectrum along with industrialization in the Barcelona area.
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Email: jpujadasmo@uoc.edu Email: jclaretmi@uoc.edu Email: jfusters@uoc.edu Email: mgilgar@uoc.edu |
Regiocat |
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The objective is to explore the continuity and influence of specific forms of regionalism within the margins of legality and permissiveness between 1939 and 1975, based on the recognition of their active and continuous participation in the construction of the Spanish state. The aim is to analyze the importance of regionalist discourses and practices in the political-cultural reconstruction of various territories and in the shaping and development of Spain during the second half of the 20th century.
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Email: jclaretmi@uoc.edu Email: jfusters@uoc.edu Email: mgilgar@uoc.edu |
Regiocat |
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Alto de la Cruz, Archaeology and Gender: Gender Studies in the Protohistory of the Iberian Peninsula
Advances in archaeological and protohistorical research from the 20th to the 21st century have been very positive, incorporating new tools for data analysis and interpretation. However, in the Iberian Peninsula, the necessary inclusion of a gender perspective in this analysis has been much more limited.
In the case of the protohistoric settlement of Alto de la Cruz (Cortes, Navarra), which has been and remains a historical and archaeological reference both nationally and internationally for understanding societal changes and developments during the first millennium BC in the Ebro Valley and the Iberian Peninsula, this gender perspective is urgently needed and should provide key insights into interpretations of protohistorical developments in the region.
Research at the Alto de la Cruz site was crucial for the position of Spanish archaeology in the mid-20th century. The permanent exhibition at Alto de la Cruz, inaugurated in October 2017, offers a snapshot of the work carried out between the 1940s and 1990s.
A working team has been created to analyze the site from a gender perspective.
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Email: gmunilla@uoc.edu |
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This research line addresses the various ways in which manifestations related to Modernity (avant-garde, modern architecture, cinema, and various expressions of mass culture) coexist, resist, or are promoted by the organs of Franco’s regime. This line proposes to bring historical-cultural analysis into the Spanish context of Francoism across its different socio-political stages: autarky, developmentalism, and late Francoism, exploring chronologies, artists, peripheries, and media less studied to highlight complex issues such as the relationship between fascism and modernism, modernity and regionalism, avant-garde and traditionalism, or classicism, as well as the processes of rupture and continuity in artistic modernity between the pre-war and post-war periods.
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Email: arodriguezgrane@uoc.edu Email: mgomezpr@uoc.edu |
Regiocat |
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This line of research critically explores the intertwinings between artistic production, technoscientific development and social transformations in the contemporary context. It welcomes research exploring the interrelations between art, science, technology and society (ACTS) from historical, theoretical, methodological or practical perspectives, or a combination of these. Special attention is given to approaches from media archaeology, social studies of science and technology applied to the arts, as well as philosophical approaches from new materialisms. Research on the ACTS ecosystem as a whole is also reinforced, promoting a critical understanding of the infrastructures and technoscientific imaginaries that cross it. This research line is committed to a transdisciplinary and situated perspective, capable of analysing how media and creative practices influence contemporary social processes and open up new horizons of thought, sensitivity and action.
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Email: aburbanov@uoc.edu
Email: palsinag@uoc.edu
Email: lsanchezcard@uoc.edu
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PACTS |
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Contemporary artistic practices are characterized by transcending the limitations and classifications of compartmentalized artistic languages. Adopting a post-media perspective allows the integration of both traditional techniques and digital technologies or more process-oriented and relational mediums. This doctoral thesis proposal promotes artistic research projects that do not center on the media themselves but rather on the implications of one form of materialization over another.
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Dr. Laia Blasco-Soplon
Dr. Quelic Berga Carreras
Dr. Paloma González Díaz
Dr. María Iñigo |
DARTS |
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Digital art is not only ideally placed to explore these new spaces, but very necessary in order to have approaches, strategies and responses to it that go beyond established and commodified practices, and offer alternatives that aim at pushing these possibilities not for commercial profit but for creativity and towards a more positive impact on society. Currently focusing on the liminal territory between the virtual and the real created by digital technologies, the DARTS research group is invested, through this research line, in looking at the potential of practice-based and artistic research.
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Dr. Joan Soler-Adillon
Email: jchaconp@uoc.edu
Email: emor@uoc.edu
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DARTS |
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Following the Spanish Civil War, the victorious Franco regime built a new administration based on the political purging of existing staff and offices and the appointment of new personnel, to ensure loyalty and the execution of its political mandates. This transformation encompassed the town councils (or city councils) of the country’s towns and cities, which were key state institutions given their proximity to the general public, powers, staff, and social control. Future research must allow us to better understand both the process of destruction of the republican institutions and policies and the construction (and subsequent transformations) of the new regime's power at the local level.
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Regiocat |
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This line of research builds on the concepts of deep time, media topoi and media art histories to investigate the historical and archaeological dimensions of media and the intersections with art, technology and science across diverse historical periods and cultural settings. Taking a decolonial perspective, it emphasizes a non-linear view of the temporal evolution of media, examining their cultural contexts and emphasizing experimental and archival research as methodological approaches. The thematic scope ranges from writing systems and numerical representations to computational programming languages, including analogue devices for projecting or capturing light, as well as microfluidics and new technical forms of computing. This line of research operates as a complement and counterpoint to canonical histories of knowledge and creativity. Although there is a global interest, the emphasis is on Latin America, Southern Europe and the Global South.
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Email: aburbanov@uoc.edu
Email: palsinag@uoc.edu
Email: lsanchezcard@uoc.edu
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PACTS |
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This research line focuses on the realization and study of inter- and transdisciplinary artistic practices. It uses process research methodologies known as practice as research (PaR) or practice-based research (PbR) to generate critical and transformative knowledge. This line explores the capacity of artistic, curatorial and design practices to intervene critically in social contexts and generate new knowledge. These practices are closely related to other areas of knowledge and are nourished by concepts, visions and approaches from the humanities, sciences and technologies.
The results of PaR/PbR include the development of methodological and epistemic tools that explore new materialities and processes, as well as the creation of aesthetic objects and experiences. This line fosters dialogues that allow for a critique of the present with a decolonial perspective, connecting practices with the development of situated and socially relevant knowledge.
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Email: aburbanov@uoc.edu
Email: palsinag@uoc.edu
Email: lsanchezcard@uoc.edu
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PACTS |
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This research line addresses the study of the societies that have inhabited and interacted around the Mediterranean Sea over time, such as the Greeks, Phoenicians, Romans, and Iberians. From prehistory to Late Antiquity, it allows for the analysis of the historical, social, and cultural processes that have shaped the Mediterranean as an interconnected, dynamic, and plural space. These research projects may combine the study of material culture with textual sources, traditional archaeological methodologies, and digital tools, with the aim of understanding the mechanisms of mobility, social, economic, and religious transformation, and identity construction that have characterized Mediterranean communities.
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Email: jmunozsog@uoc.edu
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SEC-History |