Staff profile

Research

I have recently completed a monograph on Spanish filmmaker Bigas Luna, currently under review with Manchester University Press. The Films of Bigas Luna is part of a larger project that includes the edited collections El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna (2020, Tirant lo Blanch, 348 pp.), Spanish Erotic Cinema (2017, Edinburgh University Press, 264 pp.), and a special issue of Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas 13.1 (2016, 113 pp.).

My research on Bigas Luna has informed a series of international events, The Bigas Luna Tribute, that I organise in collaboration with the filmmaker’s daughter, art curator Betty Bigas, since 2015. The events have included over 100 film screenings, several art exhibitions and other events in collaboration with film theatres and festivals in ten different countries and some 25 cities around the world, most recently Madrid (2021), New York, Copenhagen, Cleveland OH, Edinburgh (2022), Los Angeles, London (2023), Genoa, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia (2024). One of our most recent retrospectives, at the American Cinematheque in LA, attracted over 1000 people. The 10th year of this project received support from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sports. For more information, please visit the project website. I have talked about this project and my research on Bigas Luna for international media outlets including national newspapers of Spain, El País (2017 and 2022), Australia, The Age - and across Fairfax network (2018), Costa Rica, La nación (2018), The Festival Insider FRED podcast (2018), New Books Network (2021), Correio de Manhã (2024) and on national Spanish television, RTVE2  (Historia de nuestro cine, May 2021). I have also introduced Bigas Luna films at festivals in Australia, Mexico, the UK and Spain, including the SEMINCI in Valladolid in 2022, at the National Academia de Cine in 2024 (full recording) and at the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival, SSIFF, also in 2024.  Since 2020 I also produce, edit and co-host a Bigas Luna podcast that can be accessed here. Recent guests have included scriptwriters Cuca Canals and Carmen Chaves, editors Teresa Font, Jaume Martí, or Anastasi Rinos, set designer Chu Uroz, filmmakers Santiago Garrido, Javier Gutiérrez and Carles Porta, sound designers Albert Manera and Ricard Casals, director of photography Albert Pascual, makeup artist Patricia Reyes, costume designer Ana Herce, casting director Consol Tura or actors including Abel Folk, Laya Martí, Giovana Zacarías or AItana Sánchez-Gijón.

My main area of study has been masculinities and male bodies in contemporary film and popular culture. My work in that field produced the books Cuerpos de cine: masculinidades carnales en el cine y la cultura popular contemporáneos (Bellaterra, 2013, 380 pp) - single-authored - and Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema - co-authored (I B Tauris, 2007, 288 pp); as well as two edited volumes: the book Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema (I B Tauris, 2009, 271 pp) and a special issue of the journal Studies in Hispanic Cinemas (3.3; 2007).

I recently initiated a new book project with Alfredo Martinez Expósito (University of Melbourne). This new book, provisionally entitled Second Skins, will focus on representations of male bodies in Spanish cinema from 2008 until the present day, exploring how important social events such as the financial crisis of the late 2000s, the 15M, the re-emergence of the far-right since 2013 or the Covid-19 health crisis have impacted understandings of masculinities in contemporary Spain. The project has received support from The CASS Foundation, with a Walter Mangold Fellowship in 2022 and 2023. More info here.

I am also working on the edition of a special journal issue of the late Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons and an article about 1980s nostalgia and Tribute Acts of the Spanish pop music band Mecano. 

My most recent publications (since 2020) are displayed below. 

Other work in my field of study

I am an editorial board member of the journal Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas and an advisory board member for the International Journal of Iberian Studies. 

I co-host Pleibéricos with my colleague Dr Esther Gimeno Ugalde (Pompeu Fabra University), a series of online presentations of new books in the area of Iberian Studies in conversation with the authors/editors, regularly hosted on our YouTube and podcast channels. We also collaborate with New Books Network in Español for the channel 'Estudios Ibéricos'. In 2022, Pleibéricos received a grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport (Hispanex) to host a workshop at the Instituto Cervantes HQs in Madrid for a hybrid panel at an Iberian Studies conference and to create a database of new publications in Iberian Studies presented in Pleibéricos. The database can be accessed here. 

Other affiliations/visiting positions

Most recently, I held a Walter Mangold visiting fellowship at the University of Melbourne in Australia (2022-23). I am an honorary fellow of the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (MIAS,François Chevalier fellow in residence in 2021) and have been a visiting scholar at the universities of California Berkeley (USA) and Pittsburgh (USA) in 2015, Harvard (USA) in 2012, CUNY Graduate Center (USA) in 2010, and Queensland (Australia) in 2005 and 2002. I am the Durham contact for our postgraduate exchange with The University of California Berkeley. I have been an external examiner for Hispanic Studies programmes in several UK universities, most recently Cambridge and Kent. I was also chair of the Quality Assurance Review for Spanish programmes at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago (2014). In 2020, I initiated and co-founded the Durham University partnership with the British Film Institute.

Honorary Vice-Consul of Spain in the North East of England

I am honorary vice-consul of Spain in Newcastle, responsible for the North East and Cumbria. Please direct all consular queries and appointment requests for passports, NIEs, etc., to ch.newcastle@maec.es, and I will respond within 48 hours. Please do not send personal data or documentation to my Durham University email address. 

• Contemporary European Cinema (Spanish and British)
• Contemporary Spain
• Bigas Luna
• Ventura Pons
• Erotic cinema
• Queer cinema
• Auteur cinema
• Gender, sexuality and the body
• Popular music
• Haptic visuality

Authored book

• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2013). Cuerpos de cine: masculinidades carnales en el cine y la cultura popular. Edicions Bellaterra
• Fouz-Hernández, S., & Martínez-Expósito, A. (2007). Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema. I.B. Tauris

Book review

• Fouz Hernández, S. (2022). BOOK REVIEW Hartson, Mary T (2017) Casting Masculinity in Spanish Film. Negotiating Identity in a Consumer Age (Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books), ISBN 9781498537117 (Hardback, $95), 978-1-4985-3712-4 (eBook, $90)
• Fouz Hernández, S. (2022). BOOK REVIEW Aguado, Txetxu. Sexualidades disidentes: un acercamiento fílmico desde la prostitución y la pornografía. Madrid: Dykinson, 2019. 320pp. ISBN 978-84-1324-162-3
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2020). Book Review: Spanish Lessons: Cinema and Television in Contemporary Spain by Paul Julian Smith.New York/Oxford: Berghahn Books. 2017. vi + 176 pp.; 9 illustrations. Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, 4(1), https://doi.org/10.1080/24741604.2020.1706975

Chapter in book

• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2022). Spanish Queer Cinema. In I. West (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.1365
• Fouz Hernández, S. (2021). ‘Tablas, memoria, deseo: la vejez en el cine de Ventura Pons’. In B. Zecchi, R. Medina, C. Moreiras Menor, & M. P. Rodríguez (Eds.), Envejecimientos y cines ibéricos (141-168). Tirant lo Blanch
• Fouz Hernández, S., & Martinez Expósito, A. (2020). Transnational and Migrant Queer Affects in Two Basque Films. In J. Williams (Ed.), Queering the Migrant in Contemporary European Cinema (59-71). Routledge
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2020). Segon origen (2015) y Bigas x Bigas (2016). In S. Fouz-Hernández (Ed.), El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna (315-338). Tirant lo Blanch
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2020). Introducción. In S. Fouz-Hernández (Ed.), El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna (17-31). Tirant lo Blanch
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2020). Bambola (1996). In S. Fouz-Hernández (Ed.), El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna (177-201). Tirant lo Blanch

Conference Paper

• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023, September). Interview with Icíar Bollaín at the Instituto Cervantes Manchester. 15 September 2023
• Fouz-Hernández, S., & Martinez-Expósito, A. (2023, June). Second Skins. A New Look at Male Bodies in Spanish Cinema. Talk at the Instituto Cervantes Sydney, 1 June 2023
• Fouz-Hernández, S., & Martinez-Expósito, A. (2023, May). Second Skins. A New Look at Male Bodies in Spanish Cinema (2008-2022). Talk with Alfredo Martinez-Expósito at the University of Queensland, Spanish and Latin American Studies Seminar Series, 31 May 2023. Paper presented at Spanish and Latin American Studies Seminar Series, University of Queensland
• Fouz-Hernández, S., & Martinez-Expósito, A. (2023, May). Segundas Pieles. Masculinidades y cuerpos masculinos en el cine español reciente. Paper presented at Wally Thompson, Latin American and Iberian Studies Showcase, La Trobe University, La Trobe University, Melbourne
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023, May). Spanish Queer Cinema, talk at Ormond College, University of Melbourne. 10 May 2023
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023, March). Spanish Cinema Research and Its Impact Beyond Academia. The Bigas Luna Tribute. Talk at the University of Texas at Austin. 27 March 2023
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023, March). Bigas Luna’s Iberian Portraits Trilogy, Talk at San Diego State University, 14 March 2023
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023, January). Introduction Film Dressed in Blue at Roxie Theater, San Francisco. 10 January 2023
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023, January). Aging Gay Men in the Films of Ventura Pons. Paper presented at MLA Annual Convention, San Francisco, USA
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2022, October). La madurez gay masculina en el cine de Ventura Pons. Paper presented at X Congreso Internacional de GECA: Cine Queer en el Mundo, Universidad Complutense Madrid
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2022, September). Curating Bigas Luna, Re-thinking Iberia. Paper presented at 2022 Walter Mangold Public Lecture, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2022, May). Asking for the moon? Re-thinking Iberia through Bigas Luna’s La teta y la luna thirty years later. Paper presented at Conversations on Iberian Studies: Challenges and Opportunities, University of Copenhagen
• Fouz Hernández, S., & Gimeno Ugalde, E. (2021, January). Uso de herramientas online y redes sociales para diseminar investigación y estrategias de impacto social en las Artes y Humanidades: los casos de Pelibéricos y The Bigas Luna Tribute. Paper presented at MIAS Seminar Series 2021, Casa de Velázquez, Madrid, Spain
• Fouz Hernández, S. (2021, January). Introductory talk for exhibition opening ‘La libertad de los símbolos’ (20 January 2021) and book launch/talk El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna (21 January 2021), Ámbito Cultural El Corte Inglés, Valencia, Spain (part of ‘El año de Bigas Luna’). Paper presented at El año de Bigas Luna, Valencia, Spain
• Fouz Hernández, S. (2020, September). 'Homoerotic Desire in Contemporary Spanish Cinema: from Pedro Almodóvar to Ventura Pons'. Paper presented at Instituto Cervantes Manchester, (virtual event)
• Fouz-Hernández, S., Expósito, A. M., & Rua, S. G. (2020, August). Round table 'Descubriendo a Bigas Luna',. Paper presented at Descubriendo a Bigas Luna, Instituto Cervantes Sydney (online)
• Fouz Hernández, S. (2020, June). Virtual Book Launch, El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna, Tirant lo Blanch publishers
• Fouz Hernández, S. (2020, January). ´Operación mariconez: queer-escuchando a Mecano 30 años después´, conference paper (Iberian 20th and 21st Century Peninsular panel “Popular Music and Society in Spain”), MLA Annual Conference Seattle, January 2020

Edited book

• Fouz Hernández, S. (Ed.). (2020). El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna. Tirant lo Blanch
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (Ed.). (2017). Spanish Erotic Cinema. Edinburgh University Press
• Cairns, L., & Fouz Hernández, S. (Eds.). (2014). Re-thinking ‘Identities’: Cultural Articulations of Alterity and Resistance in the New Millennium. Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0607-1
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (Ed.). (2009). Mysterious Skin: Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema. I. B. Tauris
• Fouz-Hernández, S., & Jarman-Ivens, F. (Eds.). (2004). Madonna's Drowned Worlds: New Approaches to Her Cultural Transformations 1983-2003. Routledge-Ashgate

Journal Article

• Fouz Hernández, S. (2024). No Strangers: Older Gay Men in the Films of Ventura Pons. Romance Quarterly, 71(1), 95-109. https://doi.org/10.1080/08831157.2023.2294502
• Fouz-Hernández, S., & Gimeno Ugalde, E. (2023). Estudios ibéricos online. El futuro de las iniciativas virtuales.Informe del encuentro en la sede del Instituto Cervantes. International Journal of Iberian Studies, 36(2), 165-176. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijis_00100_7

Newspaper/Magazine Article

• Fouz-Hernandez, S. (2024). Ventura Pons 1945-2024. [Mediático]
• Fouz-Hernández, S. (2023). The Whale: Brendan Fraser’s comeback offers rare representation of the fat queer male body on screen. Article in The Conversation Newspaper, 3 February 2023

Other (Digital/Visual Media)

• Fouz-Hernandez, S. (2020). El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna PODCAST. [Podcast]

Presentation

• Fouz-Hernandez, S. (2024, June). La trilogía de Retratos Ibéricos. Presented at Bigas Luna Symposium, Genoa International Poetry Festival
• Fouz-Hernandez, S. (2024, May). Colloquium Yo soy La Juani (dir. Bigas Luna, 2006), Academia de Cine Madrid