Renee Congdon

Position
Graduate Student
Bio/Description

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. 

Education

  • B.A. in Spanish with Honors, minor in English (summa cum laude), Colgate University, 2020
  • M.A. in Spanish & Portuguese, conferred en route to Ph.D., Princeton University, 2023

Selected Publications

Articles & Book Chapters:
Congdon, Renee. "Imagining the End of the World from the Edge of the World: Radical Non-(Re)productivity and Unproductive Expenditure in Destello bravío (2021)." Center and Periphery in 21st-century Literature, Cinema, Art, and Media from Spain. Edited by Amparo Alpañés. Vernon Press, 2025.

Congdon, Renee. "Olores y sonidos de la posguerra española: un análisis sensorial de Nada." Carmen Laforet: Después de Nada mucho, edited by Mark P. del Mastro & Caragh Wells. Albatros Ediciones: Colección Diálogos Peninsulares, 2022.

Pérez-Carbonell, Marta and Renee Congdon. "On Identity, or How Two Contemporary Spanish Novels Shape and Shake Up the Limits of the Self," Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea (ALEC). vol 45, no. 1, 2020.

Book Reviews:
Congdon, Renee. "City of Noise: Towards a Sonic Understanding of Urban Geographies in Los Angeles." Review of Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles, by Marina Peterson. Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 9, Issue 2, 2023, pp. 291-294.