Bio
Dr. Santiago Juan-Navarro is Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University, where he has taught since 1995 (Professor since 2010). A scholar of literature, film, and comparative cultural studies, his work bridges Iberian and Latin American traditions with particular attention to Cuban cinema, the politics of memory, and digital humanities.
His research spans several fronts: Cuban and Cuban-diaspora cinema; Spanish-American narrative; dystopian and utopian imaginaries; and the visual cultures of empire. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles, including projects on Juana of Castile, La ciudad en la literatura y el cine, and Memoria histórica, género e interdisciplinariedad. In recent years, he has developed a broad study of dystopia in twenty-first-century Cuban cinema (2008–2023), understanding it as a form of critical warning in post-utopian contexts. In parallel, he investigates Hispanidad and political theology in Franco-era cinema.
Committed to public-facing scholarship, Juan-Navarro co-founded the Cuban Diaspora Film Archive (CDfA) with filmmaker and doctoral candidate Eliecer Jiménez Almeida—a digital repository and cultural hub dedicated to documenting, preserving, and studying the audiovisual production of Cubans in exile. At FIU he designs hybrid and online courses in literature and film, including “The Films of the Cuban Diaspora,” and mentors graduate students across the humanities. He has served on editorial boards, organized conferences, and evaluated grants and fellowships for entities such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Trained as a comparative humanist, Juan-Navarro holds a Ph.D. (1995) and M.Phil. (1991) from Columbia University, and a D.Phil. (1999) from the University of Valencia. His teaching covers narrative theory, cultural memory, and transatlantic film history.
Current projects. His principal book project is Projecting Empire: The Spanish-Cuban-American War in Cinema and Cultural Memory, a transnational monograph that examines how films from the United States, Spain, and Cuba have represented the 1895–1898 conflict. Drawing on more than two decades of research and prior peer-reviewed publications, the book analyzes both fictional and non-fictional works in their historical, political, and cultural contexts to show how cinema has functioned as mythmaking, propaganda, and identity formation. It argues that screen depictions of 1898 are far from neutral: they reflect—and actively shape—national narratives of loss, heroism, and imperial ambition. Additional projects include: (1) a sustained inquiry into dystopia as a critical lens in Cuban screen cultures; (2) a political-theology reading of Hispanidad in mid-century Spanish cinema; and (3) the digital expansion of the CDfA to support research, teaching, and public curation.