Historian, author, antifascist, and public scholar.
Dr. Louie Dean Valencia is an Associate Professor of Digital History at Texas State. He holds a Ph.D. in Early and Late Modern European History from Fordham University and is interested in countercultures and how they affect society at large, particularly through the cultural production of avant-garde, popular, queer, and youth cultures. Dr. Valencia has served as a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University.
His books include Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain and Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History. He is an expert on youth culture and the construction of pluralistic and fascistic politics. Along with the history of print, media, and digital technologies, he studies the intersections of identity and community formation, and antifascist and fascism. His work focuses on queer youth culture and the role of history in the public sphere. He received his A.M. and Ph.D. in Early and Late Modern European History from Fordham University in New York City.
Dr. Valencia’s current research focuses on HIV/AIDS in Europe through the lenses of urban studies, healthcare policy, community organizing, technological innovation and information distribution, and scientific research. He is also completing a book on masculinity, online fandoms, and British musician Harry Styles. Dr. Valencia’s work has been published in Contemporary European History, Fascism, European Comic Art, EuropeNow, amongst others. Dr. Valencia’s work is known internationally, and has been covered by NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, BBC, CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian, El Periódico, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Times, The Independent, the Evening Standard, the Telegraph, The Today Show, Good Morning America, Elle, Jezebel, GQ, Vanity Fair, NME, Billboard, Rolling Stone, American Song Writer, Dazed, Teen Vogue, L’essentiel, Cosmopolitan, Paper, Grazia, Hunger, Nylon, Complex, VICE, Bustle, Crave, Gay Times, Gay.IT, amongst hundreds of other local and international media outlets.
Antiauthoriarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain:
Clashing with Fascism
How did kids, hippies and punks challenge a fascist dictatorship and imagine an impossible dream of an inclusive future?
His first book, Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism, published Bloomsbury Academic in 2018, explores the role of youth in shaping a democratic Spain, focusing on their urban performances of dissent, their consumption of censored literature, political-literary magazines and comic books and their involvement in a newly developed underground scene. This book examines how young Spaniards occupied public plazas, subverted Spanish cultural norms and undermined the authoritarian state by participating in a postmodern punk subculture that eventually grew into the ‘Movida Madrileña’.
Request a copy for your local library or purchase here.
Shortlisted for the 2020 European Studies Book Award!
Reviews
‘Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain makes a lively and innovative contribution to the body of scholarship that explores the origins of the democratic transition in Spain in the emerging civil society of the Franco dictatorship’.
Pamela Radcliff
University of California, San Diego
President of the Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
In Bulletin for Bulletin for Spanish and Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
‘Louie Dean Valencia-García shows in his deeply engaging and analytically eloquent monograph…[T]his book makes a significant contribution to the history of youth cultures and to the scholarly consideration of “the youth” as a crucial political and social category with its own agency’.
Kasper E. Braskén
Abo Akademi University,
Turku, Finland
In H-Net
‘Valencia-García’s book constitutes an insightful, very original and much-needed study of a series of cultural practices and artefacts that allowed young Spaniards to develop a counterculture that eroded the fascist foundations of Francoist Spain’.
David Miranda Barreiro
Bangor University
Bangor, Wales, UK
‘Lejos de los manidos tópicos y estereotipos, de los clichés sobre esta época de aquellos que hicieron todo y de todo, este libro dota de inteligencia política a sus protagonistas, a través de una forma nada convencional, esto es, a través de sus propios gustos y provocaciones. Algo, hay que insistir, muy difícil de hacer y conseguir en un libro de investigación histórica’.
Gutmaro López Bravo
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
In CTXT
‘This is what I’ve been waiting for – a colorful and creative exploration of youth resistance under the Franco regime. From Superman in Spain to naked pro-democracy protesters, Louie Dean Valencia-García uncovers it all. And given the recent emergence of authoritarianism in the United States and Europe, this book couldn’t have come at a more opportune time’.
Hamilton M. Stapell
Associate Professor of History, State University of New York, New Paltz, USA
‘This is a highly original study that investigates for the first time youth culture and the practice of everyday life in Spain under the late dictatorship and transition to democracy. In a series of brilliant chapters, the author examines a wide range of little known and less studied sources, often culled from archives: school textbooks, comics, nightclubs, and fanzines. From National-Catholic ideologies to Pedro Almodóvar via Superman and punk, this book offers a lucid and compelling account of a fascinating multimedia field’.
Paul Julian Smith
Distinguished Professor, City University of New York, USA
‘An extremely lively and stimulating contribution to the much-neglected social and cultural history of twentieth-century Spain. It offers a reconstruction of antiauthoritarian youth culture that delineates not only the intersections between dictatorship and democracy, but also the hitherto unexplored interstices of the transgressive, underground and counter cultures of the two regimes’.
Nigel Townson
Senior Lecturer in Spanish History, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories
He is the editor of Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories (Routledge 2020), which explores the ways contemporary far-right movements have used history to legitimate themselves, under contract with Routledge.
In this book, historians, sociologists, neuroscientists, lawyers, cultural critics, and literary and media scholars come together to offer an interconnected and comparative collection for understanding how contemporary far-right, neo-fascist, Alt-Right, Identitarian, and New Right movements have proposed revisions and counter-narratives to accepted understandings of history, fact and narrative. The essays found here bring forward urgent questions to diverse public, academic, and politically-minded audiences interested in how historical understandings of race, gender, class, nationalism, religion, law, technology and the sciences have been distorted by these far-right movements. If scholars of the last twenty years, like Francis Fukuyama, believed that neoliberalism marked an “end of history,” this volume shows how the far right is effectively threatening democracy and its institutions through the dissemination of alt-facts and histories.
Dr. Valencia has held fellowships from the United States Library of Congress and the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. He has received grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport, the Center for European Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Santander Universities. At the Museum of the City of New York, he has curated exhibitions on swing dance in Harlem and the photography of Carl Van Vechten, and his work is featured in the permanent exhibition, New York at Its Core. He has served as a director for the Aspects of Leadership Summer Institute at Princeton University, a fully-funded seven-week program that invites high-achieving, rising high school seniors from across the United States from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds applying to selective universities. He has also worked as a digital strategy analyst on major projects for GOOP by Gwyneth Paltrow, Pepsi, Ann Taylor/LOFT, Patrón Tequila, amongst others.
He is a member of the Scientific and Editorial Committee for the Archivo de la Frontera, a UNESCO project of the Centro Europeo de la Difisión de las Ciencias Sociales at the Universidad de Alcalá in Spain. He has served as a Director of the Aspects of Leadership Summer Institute at Princeton University, a fully-funded seven-week program that invites high-achieving, rising high school seniors from across the United States from lower-socioeconomic backgrounds applying to selective universities.
Contributions to edited volumes on topics as diverse as European Studies, the Radical Right, and Popular Culture
