Profile

Interests: 

Contemporary peninsular culture, literature and film, myth and folklore, popular culture, women’s work and domesticity, sensory studies, food studies, rural imaginaries

Biography: 

Renee Congdon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University and, during the 2025-2026 academic year, will be a Graduate Fellow of the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. She focuses on Spanish culture, literature, and film from the late 19th century to the present day, with a particular emphasis on addressing how literary and cultural objects can illuminate legacies of popular resistance on the peripheries of the Spanish state. Her recent publications include a piece on sensory detail as strategic narrative technique in Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Albatros Ediciones, 2022) and a chapter on Ainhoa Rodríguez’s 2021 film Destello bravío and its radical engagement with extinctionist discourses about “empty” Spain (Vernon Press, 2025). Her doctoral thesis–currently in progress–brings together her interests in popular culture and gendered and domestic labor, analyzing the fraught sociocultural legacies of the proletariat washerwoman in the Spanish popular imaginary from the late 19th century to the present day.