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."