Justin Crumbaugh, Associate Professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College, will be the featured speaker at the Iowa Wesleyan College Forum program, Thursday, September 17. His presentation will begin at 11 a.m. in the Chapel Auditorium. It is open to the public.
Crumbaugh specializes in Spanish and Basque studies, particularly in relation to critical theory, cinema, political media, and economic discourse
Crumbaugh has taught a range of courses on modern Spain, including seminars on themes such as consumer culture, travel narratives, Basque political violence, and the notion of economic and cultural “backwardness.”
Crumbaugh’s will speak on “victimism” and the cultural battles for victim status historically and globally. Dr. Stewart James-Lejarcegui, associate professor of Spanish at Iowa Wesleyan, describes him as “a wicked smart observer of culture and public discourse.”
He is the author of Destination Dictatorship: The Spectacle of Spain's Tourist Boom and the Reinvention of Difference (SUNY Press 2009), a book that links the surge in mass tourism in Spain during the 1960s to the Franco dictatorship's attempts to reconsolidate power through modernization and “economic government.”
His scholarly articles appear in the Hispanic Review, the Hispanic Research Journal, the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, and other publications. Crumbaugh's current research examines evolving ideas about victimhood in contemporary Spain, from myths about “red terror” during the Spanish Civil War to the current media focus on the “victims of terrorism.”
Before joining the Mount Holyoke College faculty in 2003, Crumbaugh was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a graduate of Kalamzoo College and earned his Ph.D. from Emory University.
