Germán

Labrador Méndez

In 2024, I joined the CSIC as a distinguished researcher of the ATRAE Program, funded by the Spanish National Research Agency (AEI). Specializing in the field of contemporary Iberian cultural studies, I am currently directing the research project Poetics and Democracy. Literary imagination, cultural archives in Spain (1868-2012) (ATR2023-145134). Until 2024, I have been a Professor at Princeton University and also the Director of Public Activities at the Museo Reina Sofía (2021-2023).

Holding BAs in Spanish and Romance Philology, and a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Literature from the University of Salamanca, co-advisored with the Université Paris IV-La Sorbonne, I have been also a visiting researcher at the University of California-Berkeley and New York University. In 2008 I joined the Department of Spanish Languages and Cultures at Princeton University, where I was promoted to Professor in 2018. I have taught at the Universität Hamburg as a DAAD professor and at CUNY-The Graduate Center. I collaborate or have collaborated with a dozen national and international research projects and study groups, directed 8 doctoral dissertations and participated in conferences, congresses and seminars at more than a hundred universities, museums and cultural centers in the US and Europe. Between 2022 and 2024, I was the director of Connective Tissues. An Independent Program in Critical Museology, Artistic Research Practices, and Cultural Studies at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid.

I am the author of more than a hundred monographs, articles and book chapters in journals and publishing houses in Spanish, English, Galician and Portuguese, on the relations between culture and democracy, memory and citizenship, aesthetic and political imagination in the Iberian Modernities, with special attention to subaltern processes, popular cultures and alternative or marginalized archives. I have published Letras arrebatadas. Poesía y química en la transición española [Raptured Letters. Poetry and Drugs in the Spanish Transition] (Devenir 2009), Culpables por la literatura. Imaginación política y contracultura en la transición española (1968-1986) [Guilty of Literature. Political Imagination and Counter-Culture in the Spansish Transition] (Akal, 2017) and Libidinal Economy of the Spanish Transition (Reina Sofía, 2019), and I have co-edited, among other texts, El primer loco [The First Inmate] de Rosalía de Castro (Alvarellos Editora, 2019) or El exilio interior [The Inner Exile] de Miguel Salabert (Hoja de Lata, 2025).

As a curator, I have presented, among others, the exhibitions Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images of the Spanish Transition (MNCARS, 2019), Sempre máis. Arte, ecoloxía e protesta na Galicia do Prestige [Ever more. Art, Ecology and Protest in Galicia after the 2002's Black Tide] (Auditorio de Galicia, 2023), El Tragaluz democrático. Políticas de vida y muerte en el Estado español [The Democratic Skylight. Politics of Life and Death in the Spanish State] (Memoria Democrática, 2023), Esperpento. Aesthetic Revolution and Popular Culture (MNCARS, 2024), School of Past. Barcelona and the Radical Political Imagination (Manifesta 15, 2024) and Ollos de Vidro. Formas para outra historia de Galicia [Cristal Eyes. Forms towards another history of Galicia] (Auditorio de Galicia, 2025). I also advised the collection on exile presented at the Museo Reina Sofia (The Lost Thought, 2021).