Faculty Profiles
Diana Roxana Jorza
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Diana Roxana Jorza is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana. She specializes in modern and contemporary Spanish culture, focusing especially on film, humor, comedy, intellectual history, and the relationship between hegemonic and alternative public spheres. She is currently working on a book manuscript on Spanish film comedy during the first decades of Franco’s regime, drawing upon emotion and media studies alongside film and humor studies, and focusing on a largely unknown cinematic corpus that has greatly contributed to the visibility of new, alternative role models in the harsh period of Franco’s dictatorship. She is the author of several articles on law and humor, dark comedy, political and literary utopias, melodrama, emotion and audience studies, religious and Civil War cinema, Neorealism, etc. In 2016, she organized the MLA special session, "Cinema and Public Spheres in Franco’s Spain". In 2014 she was invited to participate in a round-table discussion on postwar Spain at the University of Notre Dame conference on "Fascism, War, and Historical Schisms in Contemporary Europe."
Education
- Ph.D., Princeton University
- M.A., Johns Hopkins University
- B.A. and M.A., “Babeş-Bolyai” University, Cluj Napoca, Romania
Areas of Expertise
- Modern and contemporary Spanish literature and culture
- Spanish cinema
- Spanish postwar comedy
- Spanish intellectual history
Research Interests
- Modern and contemporary Spanish literature and culture
- Spanish intellectual history
- Film comedy, humor, and dark humor
- Melodrama and emotion studies
- Political and literary utopias
Courses Recently Taught
- MLSP 490 Leftover Meanings: Rethinking Food Representations in Modern Spanish Culture
- MLSP 490 Engaging the Emotions in Modern Spanish Culture
- MLSP 490 In Search of Closure: The Comedy and Melodrama of Adversity in Modern Spanish Culture
- MLSP 320 Introduction to Hispanic Cultural Studies
- MLSP 212 Spanish Composition and Grammar
- MLSP 210 Advanced Spanish Grammar
- MLSP 111-112 Intermediate Spanish
- MLSP 101-102 Beginner Spanish
Creative and Scholarly Work
- “Through a Comedic Glass, Darkly: Ethics, Humor, and Home Ownership in Spain’s Early Technocratic Years 1957–1963”. forthcoming in Humor and the Law: Laughter as Critique, a special issue of Law, Culture, and the Humanities (2023).
- “Teaching Miguel Picazo’s La tía Tula (1964) to College Students in the United States: A Critically Disregarded Interpretive Potential”, in Approaches to Teaching the Works of Miguel de Unamuno, ed. Luis Alvarez-Castro (New York: Modern Language Association, 2020: pp. 212-223).
- “Authority and Excess in Cielo negro (1951): Challenges of Religious Melodrama in the Spain of the Fifties”. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90 (2013): 311-30.
- “Triunfalismo nacional y mística guerrera en ¡Harka! y ¡A mí la Legión!“. Bulletin of Spanish Studies LXXXIX.7-8 (2012): 49-59.
- “A Neorealist Melodrama’s Problematic Contention with Hollywood: Calle Mayor (1956)”. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 7.2 (July 2010): 117-32.
Professional Memberships
- MLA
- ACLA