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Research Stay: Mireia Vives Martínez

Mireia Vives Martínez is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English and German at the University of Valencia, where she teaches courses on German literature. She is also a member of the Research Group RIALE (Relaciones Interculturales Alemania – España / Intercultural Relations Germany – Spain), whose main objective is to establish the foundations for a comprehensive research on intercultural relations between Spain and German-speaking countries from the Middle Ages to the present day. Their research focuses mainly on travel narratives written by German-speaking travelers to Spain.

Their current research project (“Construcción imagológica de España en la odepórica femenina de lengua alemana: sistematización desde una perspectiva de género” / “The Imagological Construction of Spain in German-Language Female Travel Writing: A Systematization from a Gender Perspective”) is funded by the Valencian government. Its main goal is to explore whether it is possible to identify a specifically feminine aesthetic in the travel accounts of German-speaking women in Spain, focusing on women’s travel narratives of the late 19th century.

Mireia Vives Martínez is currently undertaking a research stay in Koblenz from June 1st to September 1st with the research network “Traveling Bodies: Bodies and Corporeality in Travel Literature”. Her objective during this stay is to analyse a corpus of travel narratives to Spain authored by German women, paying particular attention to how they reflect on their own bodies. Through this analysis, she seeks to determine whether these physical experiences contribute to a gendered experience that ultimately influences the travelers’ perception of Spain.