(Other names: Jose M. Faraldo)

Profesor Titular, Catedrático acreditado por la ANECA (Associate Professor, tenured)

jmfarald@ucm.es

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9517-8316

Planta 10ª - Despº. 35 / Tel. (+34) 913947807

 

Associate Professor (tenured) at the Complutense University of Madrid. An expert on Eastern European history and culture in the 20th century, José has worked on memory, media and visual culture, secret police, Europeanism in Eastern Europe, nationalism, borderlands, architecture and urban history, resistance to Nazism and Stalinism. Extensive experience in international academia. Fluent in German, English, Russian and Polish. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 with a dissertation on Russian nationalism. Between 1997 and 2002 he worked at the European University Viadrina (Frankfurt/Oder, Germany) as a lecturer (Spanish language and history; Eastern European history [Chair of Eastern European History, Prof. Karl Schlögel]) and as a postdoctoral researcher [Chair of Social History, Prof. Helga Schulz]. From 2004 to 2008, he was a project manager and researcher at the Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, where he participated in the design of national and international projects and directed three of them.

Literary translator for over twenty years, from Polish, German, English and Russian into Spanish. He has translated authors such as Andrzej Sapkowski, Olga Tokarczuk, Daniel Odija, Kir Bulichov and Andreas Eschbach.

He has enjoyed research stays at Harvard University (RCCCHU fellowship), Humboldt University in Berlin, GWZO in Leipzig, University of Bucharest (Romania), University of Warsaw, Jan Dlugosz University in Czestochowa, (Poland), Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá, (Colombia), the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Karelia, (Petrozavodsk, Russian Federation), Stanford University, (California, Del Amo Fellowship), Moscow State Linguistic University (Russia), and Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (Poland).

Member of the Humanities Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation (Strasbourg) from 2010 to 2012.

Member of the editorial board of the journals "National Identities" (Routledge), "Anuarul Institutului De Istorie Orală" (Cluj-Napoca), "Studia Histórica. Contemporánea" (Salamanca) and "Pamiec i Sprawiedliwosc" (IPN, Warsaw); Director of the Cuadernos de Historia Contemporánea (UCM) (2019-2022).

Supervisor of more than eleven completed doctoral theses. Postdoctoral contracts (CAM, Erasmus+) for several postdoctoral researchers.

Knight of the Order of the Republic of Poland, awarded by the President of Poland, B. Komorowski, for services to cultural rapprochement between the two countries.

Extensive dissemination and media activity: dozens of articles in national and international newspapers (El País, Tygodnik Powszechny, Polityka...), blog on the Huffington Post, regular participation in radio and television (Deutsche Welle, RTVE, RNE, SER, Mediaset...), interviews for all these media and also for El Pais, El Mundo, La Razón, El Español, ABC; articles in magazines of historical popularization: Clío, La aventura de la historia, La maleta de Port Bou, Despertaferro.

 

Research groups

Co-creation of a REIECO research group with a monthly seminar for PhD students and young researchers and an extensive network (together with Sarah Lemmen).

https://www.ucm.es/la_otra_europa/red-de-investigacion

Co-director: HistGlobal, Grupo de Investigación de Historia Global y Transnacional (together with Sarah Lemmen).

https://www.ucm.es/historiaglobaltransnacional/

 

Research Lines

• Cultural/popular history
• Urban history
• History of everyday life
• History of East and Central Europe
• Transnational and Global history
• Nationalism and Communism
• Resistance against Fascism, National-Socialism and Stalinism
• Memory Studies

 

Current project

• The world is new. A life of Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) (work title, book)
  • Isaac Asimov is widely regarded as one of the most significant science fiction writers of the 20th century, in addition to being an exceptionally prolific and popularizer of science. But he was also a visionary, with a profound and nuanced understanding of the dangers and rewards inherent in technological development. His perception of history was rooted in the past to scrutinize the future and was endowed with enormous lucidity. Writing a biography of him means asking questions about the world we live in today and how we got there.

 

Selected projects (last years):

2024-2025, IP (PR12/24-31560, En los límites de Europa. Espacio, género y vida cotidiana en Rusia, Ucrania y España (1945-2022) [EuroLimits]

 

2023-2025, Member: "A Global Campus: Universities, Cultural Transfers And Experiencies In The 20th Century" (PID2020-113106GB-I00), dirigido por Carolina Rodríguez López (UCM)

https://www.ucm.es/globalcampus/

 

2019-2022 (Co-PI) Interacting Francoism. Entanglement, Comparison and Transfer between Dictatorships in the 20th Century (PGC2018-096492-B-I00), Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, Spain.

 

2015-2017. (PI) Collapsed Empires, Post-colonial Nations and the Construction of Historical Consciousness. Infrastructures of Memory after 1917" (HAR2015-64155-P, FEDER). https://www.ucm.es/collapsedempires/

 

2021 International project ("ONE EUROPE", No. SF2107): EuroStatue "Toppling statues: public spaces, colonial heritage and European identities", (2021). (Coordinator of UCM + individual project);

2017-2021. Member of the Management Committee of the COST action (funding by the H2020 program): CA COST Action CA16213, New exploratory phase in research on Eastern European cultures of dissidence (2017-2022). (Spanish coordinator: Surveillance in cold War);

2008, Project: (PI) funding: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)), „Krisenwahrnehmungen in der popkulturellen Sphäre. Mediale Aufarbeitung von politisch-wirtschaftlichen Stimmungen in Comics und B-Movies (1971-1989)“ „Perceptions of crisis in the pop cultural sphere. Media coverage of political and economic moods in comics and B-Movies (1971-1989) .

 

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Books (last years):

2025 Networks of Terror. Communist Secret Police Agencies in Europe (1917-1991), London, Bloomsbury (in press)

2024 Lenin. Una vida para la revolución, Madrid: La Catarata.

2024 Las redes del terror. Las policías secretas comunistas y su legado, Barcelona, Galaxia Gutenberg. (2ª Edition, revised).

2023 Rusofobia. Un ensayo sobre prejuicios y propaganda, Madrid: La Catarata.

2022 Sociedad Z. La Rusia de Vladimir Putin, Madrid: Báltica Editorial.

2022 Contra Hitler y Stalin. La resistencia en Europa (1936-1956), Madrid: Alianza Editorial

2020 El nacionalismo ruso moderno, Madrid: Báltica Editorial. (2 editions)

 

Edited Books (selected):

2023 José M. Faraldo, Gutmaro Gómez Bravo (Eds.) Interacting Francoism. Entanglement, Comparison and Transfer between Dictatorships in the 20th Century, Routledge, 2023.

2020 José M. Faraldo (Ed.) Collapsed Empires after 1917 in Europe and the Mediterranean, Zurich: Lit Verlag 2020.

2012 Carolina Rodríguez-López and José M. Faraldo (Eds.) Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project: Exiles’ Reflections on Cultural Differences, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012.

2008 Faraldo, José M. / Gulińska-Jurgiel, Paulina / Domnitz, Christian (Eds.) Europa im Ostblock. Vorstellungen und Diskurse; Europe in the Eastern Bloc. Imaginations and Discourses, Vienna/Cologne: Böhlau Verlag 2008.

 

Articles (last, indexed)

2023    “El nacionalismo ruso de Putin ¿un legado soviético?”, en: Política y sociedad, ISSN 1130-8001, ISSN-e 1988-3129, Vol. 60, Nº 3, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/poso.84414

2022, “How to Compare Dictatorships? Cultures of Surveillance in Franco’s Spain and Communist Eastern Europe in Context”, East Central Europe Vol. 49 (2022) 193–223, doi:10.30965/18763308-49020004;

2022    Surveillance of Culture, Culture of Surveillance (with Muriel Blaive), East Central Europe, Vol. 49 (2022) 145–151, doi:10.30965/18763308-49020001.

2021 “The Story of Laura. Eastern Bloc Surveillance of Spain in the Late Cold War (1967-1990)”, in: Cold War History, Vol. 21, N. 4, (DOI:10.1080/14682745.2021.1938551);

2017 “Entangled Eurocommunism: Santiago Carrillo, the Spanish Communist Party and the Eastern Bloc during the Spanish Transition to Democracy, 1968–1982” in: Contemporary European History, Volume 26, Issue 4, November 2017, pp. 647-668; doi:10.1017/S0960777317000339

 

Chapters (selected, last)

2023    Interacting Francoism. A tale of 20th century dictatorships, en José M. Faraldo, Gutmaro Gómez Bravo (Eds.) Interacting Francoism. Entanglement, Comparison and Transfer between Dictatorships in the 20th Century, Routledge, 2023, ISBN 9781032316024.

2021    The “Centres of Remembrance” in post-communist Europe, in: Jens Boel, Perrine Canavaggio and Antonio González Quintana (Eds.) Archives and Human Rights, Oxford and New York: Routledge 2021, pp. 204-2017.

2020 Emotional communities and the reconstruction of emotional bonds to alien territories: the nationalization of the Polish ‘Recovered Territories’ after 1945, in: Andreas Stynen, Maarten Van Ginderachter and Xosé M. Núñez Seixas (Eds.) Emotions and Everyday Nationalism in Modern European History, London, New York: Routledge 2020, pp. 185-204:

2017 „1937. Eine Gendenkfeier im Spannungsfeld von Terror, “Fünfter Kolonne“ und Transnationale Kommunismus“, in: Jan Claas Behrends, Nikolaus Katzer, Thomas Lindenberger (Eds.) 100 Jahre Roter Oktober. Zur Weltgeschichte der Russischen Revolution, Berlin: Links Verlag, pp. 85-106: