Researchers
Lidia Merás
Principal Researcher
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Dr. Lidia Merás is a film historian with an interest in contemporary art. She is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). She has published widely on gender studies, documentary, and European cinema. Since 2002 she has served as a member of the editorial board of the film journal Secuencias.
Prior to joining the UAM, Dr. Merás taught at Royal Holloway (University of London), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. She currently leads the research project DocRoma which focusses on the representation of the Spanish Roma in documentary film, television, and new media. She is currently writing a monograph on this subject. Lidia has presented her work, as a guest speaker, at the Museo Prado (Madrid), the Instituto de Cervantes (Berlin), and the British Film Institute (London). As of 2022 she has been an Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre for Visual Culture (University of London, Royal Holloway).
Rafael Buhigas Jiménez
Project coordinator
(Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
Rafael Buhigas Jiménez holds a PhD in Contemporary History from the Complutense University of Madrid and was runner-up for the Best Doctoral Thesis in Contemporary History Award.
During his studies at the Faculty of Geography and History, he worked as a research assistant in the Department of Contemporary History. Rafael has been involved in the organisation of seminars and projects concerning educational innovation, He has been a speaker and panel coordinator at more than twenty national and international conferences. Until 2022, he was a Research Faculty Member in training, teaching classes in the History, Art History, and Musicology degree programs at the UCM. He has been a postdoctoral researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. (USA). He is also an academic member of the “History and Commemoration” department of the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).
Associate researchers:
Bohumira Smidakova
(Georgetown University)
Bohumira Smidakova graduated from English and Spanish Philology at Universidad de Oviedo. She has completed her doctoral thesis on the representation of Romani community in Spanish cinema at Georgetown University (Washington DC), where she works as Teaching Assistant Professor of language and culture. She has published on Carmen Amaya and her role in the transformation of the representation of Roma women in Spanish cinematography. Her most recent article (forthcoming) examines music in the españolada and its impact on the conceptualization of race, more specifically Lola Flores’ 1950s films. She is currently researching on Spanish Roma film directors.
Miguel Ángel Vargas
(Universidad Pablo de Olavide)
Miguel Ángel Vargas is an art historian and stage director, an independent artist and researcher. He combines flamenco, theatre and Romani history as experiential material for both artistic and academic research. He has worked internationally as an actor, director, stage designer, exhibition curator, as head of productions and as a cultural agent among other roles within the cultural sector. exhibition curator, as head of productions and as a cultural agent among other roles within the cultural sector. He has collaborated with diverse academic institutions such as Central Saint Martins (London) and the Critical Approach to Romani Studies at the Central European University (Budapest-Vienna). He has also served as an advisor to such cultural institutions as the National Gallery of Art (Washington) and the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Encuentros Cultura y Ciudadanía. He is part of the cultural mediation team at ICAS (Institute for Culture and the Arts, Seville) and a member of the Barvalipe Academy at the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC) in Berlin. He is a lecturer in the Masters in Flamenco Research and Analysis course at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Seville) where he is also undertaking a doctorate in contemporary history.
Tamara Moya Jorge
(Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)
Tamara Moya Jorge holds a PhD in Media Research and is a member of the research group TECMERIN (Television-Cinema: Memory, Representation and Industry). She is Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University Carlos III of Madrid, where she teaches subjects related to analysis, narrative and audiovisual technologies, documentary and film studies. Her lines of research are cinema and self-representation in relation to processes of racialization, decolonization and democratization of the media. Her work “Decolonizing the film archive: contributions of Spanish filmmakers to transnational Romani self-representation” won the Young Research Award of the Spanish Association of Communication Research. He is currently developing his research within the framework of the project “The Institutional Documentary and Colonial Amateur Cinema: Analysis and Uses” (PID2021-123567NB-I00), funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation/State Research Agency of the Spanish Government and FEDER.
Petre Breazu
(Cambridge University)
Dr Petre Breazu is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, and a former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at Loughborough University. Dr Petre Breazu’s research lies in the area of discourse and racism, with special focus on the representation of the Roma in European media and political discourse. He works under the framework of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to examine practices of discrimination and social exclusion with regards to Roma and other marginalised communities. Petre’s previous research has addressed the textual and visual constructions of Roma in Romanian, Swedish and UK media, and his work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals, including Discourse and Communication, Discourse & Society, Discourse, Context, and Media, Language in Society, Ethnicities and Journal of Language and Politics. His current research at the University of Cambridge focuses on generative AI, ethics and biases (racial, gendered, political, etc.) embedded in Large Language Models.
