Alicia Fuentes Vega is a postdoctoral hired researcher in the Department of Art History of the Complutense University of Madrid. She has worked on issues of identity and cultural imaginaries from the methodology of visual studies. Her main line of research refers to the role played by images in the international rehabilitation process of the Franco regime after the Second World War. Her book Bienvenido, Mr. Turismo. Cultura visual del boom (Cátedra, 2017) collects the results of her doctoral research on the tourism imaginary of Spain during the dictatorship (Extraordinary Doctorate Award 2015, Faculty of Geography and History UCM).

During her predoctoral stage, and thanks to a FPU contract, she carried out research stays at the Free University of Berlin; Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2016, she received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation which allowed her to deepen her research on the international perception of Francoism for two years at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CMS) of the Technical University of Berlin. In 2018, she joined the Department of Art History of the UCM with the program of Research Talent Attraction of the Community of Madrid, where in addition to carrying out teaching and research tasks she collaborates as a member of the Coordination Commission of the Degree in Art History and as an academic secretary of the Master’s Degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (UCM / UAM / Museo Reina Sofía).

She has published articles and book chapters in high-impact academic publishing companies and journals, and has been an invited speaker as well as a speaker at international conferences and academic institutions. She has also worked in the fields of publishing (Editorial SM) and museology (FormARTE Fellowship at the National Library Museum, 2015), and has curated the exhibition De vacaciones en el jardín de las Hespérides. Imaginarios turísticos de la costa valenciana durante el franquismo at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM, 2020). She is co-director, with Estrella de Diego, of the newly created UCM research group Imaginarios. Procesos culturales en la contemporaneidad occidental, and is the PI of an R+D project of the UCM / CAM 2019 Call Jóvenes Doctores with the title of Imaginarios de/en la España contemporánea: cultura material, identidad y performatividad (ref: PR65 / 19-22421).

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2903-7192