Profile

Natalia Castro Picón finished her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center (City University of New York) and her B.A. at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her main fields of study are modern and contemporary Iberian literature and culture as well as transatlantic Iberian relations in the neoliberal context. She combines in her research and classes tools and methods from Cultural Studies with a Glottopolitical perspective, which focuses on the political condition of language and discourse.

She is currently working on her first book about the apocalyptic representations of crisis in culture and social movements in Spain from the 2008 economic depression until the 2020 pandemic. It is her main thesis that different uses of apocalyptic imaginaries activate in diverse ways the dual eschatological sense of the trope—the end of the world and the beginning of a new one—pursuing different political aims and projecting different cultural regimes of sense. While one part of the cultural production and public discourse warns that to jeopardize the hegemonic system entails the risk of the end of the world, another part mobilizes and embodies apocalyptic imageries to represent the end of capitalism and propose, experiment, and fantasize about new ways of social organization.

From a transatlantic perspective, she has also studied the aesthetic and political links between the Argentinian political upheaval known as the Argentinazo and the Spanish protest of the called Indignados, which arose in response to the economic crises of 2001 and 2011, respectively.

Before joining Princeton University, she taught courses in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Brooklyn College (CUNY) and in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages & Literatures City College (CUNY).