Tabea Linhard is the Joseph and Joanna Nazro Mullen Professor in Humanities at Rice University‘s Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She also serves as Faculty Associate Director for the Center for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality,
Professor Linhard’s work centers on experiences of displacement and asylum in the 1930s and 1940s and on the ways in which literary texts and other cultural artifacts depict the lived experience of moving across actual and imagined borders. She is particularly committed to understanding how displacements that happened in the twentieth century relate to those of the present day. Trained in Hispanic Studies, her research has contributed significantly to Spanish and Mexican literature and film, Migration Studies, and Jewish Studies. She is the author of Unexpected Routes: Refugee Writers in Mexico (Stanford UP, 2023), Jewish Spain: A Mediterranean Memory (Stanford UP, 2014) and Fearless Women in the Mexican Revolution and the Spanish Civil War (U of Missouri P, 2005). She co-authored Mapping Migration, Identity, and Space (Palgrave, 2018) and Revisiting Jewish Spain in the Modern Era (Routledge, 2013). Her new book Agents’ Secrets, involves the relationship between gender and espionage during the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the early years of the Cold War. The book will feature research on the lives and times of África de las Heras, Olga Benario, Hilde Krüger, and Margarita Nelken, among others.
Professor Linhard has taught courses on Spanish and Spanish American literature and cultural studies, Global Studies, the Holocaust, and migration. Her classes and seminars include “The Spanish Civil War,” “War, Migration, and Human Rights,” “Storytelling: From Oral Traditions to Radio Ambulante,” “Displacement and Asylum in World Literature,” “The Holocaust in the Sephardic World,” “All about Spanish Cinema,” and “Mediterranean Cultural Studies.”
She is a faculty co-lead of Moving Stories, a collaborative research project on migration and belonging, housed at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the founding members of the Genealogías de Sefarad Research Collective. In 2021, she coordinated the installation of Hostile Terrain 94 @ Washington University in St. Louis.
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