Jose Javier Díaz Freire

Doctorate in Contemporary History from the Universidad del País Vasco and since 1993 University Professor in the Department of Contemporary History in the same university, where he is responsible of the subjects “Contemporary history of social movements”, “Communication, gender and mass culture in the contemporary world” and of the course “Social theory within the post-modern context” as part of the University Master in Contemporary History.

His first works deal with the Second Republic and mainly stand out for the use of an innovative methodology influenced by the so-called “linguistic turn” in social science and humanities. The Republic is introduced as the scenery for a dialog between different political discourses that share the same confidence in the ideology of progress.

Further works continue that line of theoretical renewal of historiography registering in what is called “post-social history”, but submitting the discursive paradigm to a critic basis on the concepts of body, emotion and experience. A presentation of these points of view can be found in “Cuerpo a cuerpo con el giro lingüístico”, Arenal nº14, vol.1, 2007. Those new analytical perspectives have been applied to different objects of research and nowadays are oriented to the study of modernity experience in the construction process of national identities, which are not seen as the result of any essence or basis but as the product of nationalist action of different forces acting, generally, producing emotions: “El cuerpo de Aitor: emoción y discurso en la creación de la comunidad nacional vasca”, Historia Social, nº: 20, 2001.

He has directed numerous projects related to these lines of research and he is the Principal Investigator of the Research Group called “La experiencia de la sociedad moderna en España desde 1875 a 1990”.

He is the editor of two numbers of the magazine Historia Contemporánea and was secretary of this magazine. He has published articles in different specialized magazines and among them to highlight: La República y el porvenir (1993), and his contribution to the collective books: El rumor de lo cotidiano (1999); El desafío de la diferencia (2003), Los límites de la diferencia: alteridad cultural, género y prácticas sociales (2009) and Migraciones intercontinentales: entre la representación del enfrentamiento y la experiencia de contacto (2011).

https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/autor?codigo=145540
https://ehu.academia.edu/JoseJavierDiazFreire
http://orcid.org/
josejavier.diazfreire@ehu.es