Team members

Prof. María del Mar Azcona Montoliú

Professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza. My current research interests include space, stardom, cosmopolitanism and comedy. I am the author of The Multi-Protagonist Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010) and co-author, with Celestino Deleyto, of Alejandro González Iñárritu (The University of Illinois Press, 2010) and Before Sunrise (Routledge, 2023). I also co-edited Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge, 2025) with Pablo Gómez Muñoz and Julia Echeverría. My latest publications include “Don’t Stop Me Now: Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Bourne Saga” (Mobilities, 2016), “Matt Damon: A Cosmopolitan Hero for the Mainstream” (Celebrity Studies, 2018), “The Texture of the Age: Digital Construction of Unbounded Space in Birdman” (with Celestino Deleyto, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, 2021), “The Trickster and the Fool: Matt Damon and Comedy” (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2022) and “Brief Encounter: Matt Damon in Marseille” (with Celestino Deleyto, Transnational Screens, 2024).

E-mail: maazcona@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1123-1448

Dr Manuela Ruiz Pardos

Senior lecturer of Business Communication in English at the University of Zaragoza. My current research aims to explore cinematic spaces in global narratives of intimate encounters from the perspective of cosmopolitan theories. I am the author of Hollywood Romantic Comedies of the Fifties: A Critical Study of a Film Genre (The Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). My latest publications include “Cosmopolitan Space and Generic Boundaries in Hollywood Overseas Romances,” in Culture, Space and Power: Blurred Lines (David Walton and Juan A. Suarez, eds., Lexington Books, 2016), “On the Fragility of Love Across the Atlantic: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Romance in Drake Doremus Like Crazy,” in Love Across the Atlantic: US-UK Romance in Popular Culture (Barbara Brickman, Deborah Jermyn and Theodore Trost, eds., Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and “Connecting with Strangers: Cosmopolitanism, Romance and Hospitality in Transnational Romantic Comedy,” in After “Happily Ever After”: Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age, (María San Filippo, ed., Wayne State University Press, 2021).

E-mail: manoliru@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9115-1020

Dr Pablo Gómez Muñoz

Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza (Spain). My research interests include transnational cinema, science fiction, precarity, space, spectacle, cosmopolitanism, borders, and queerness. My book Science Fiction Cinema in the Twenty-First Century: Transnational Futures, Cosmopolitan Concerns (2023) received one of the 2024 ESSE and AEDEAN Book Awards. Together with María del Mar Azcona and Julia Echeverría, I have co-edited Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge, 2025). I have also written about films such as In Time, Elysium, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Upside Down, The Hunt (2020), Denis Villeneuve’s Dune adaptations and the series Years and Years.

I am Book Reviews Editor at Film Journal (published by SERCIA) and co-coordinate the Speculative Fiction workgroup at NECS (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies). In 2016, I was a visiting scholar at the University of California, Riverside.

E-mail: pgomezm@unizar.es
Bluesky: pablogomezm.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6255-295X

Dr Mónica Martín Carpio

Lecturer in English Studies at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. My research brings together contemporary cinema, utopian thinking, the sociology of globalisation and intercultural education, with a focus on egalitarian and ecological aspirations. My latest publications include the book The Rebirth of Utopia in 21st-Century Cinema: Cosmopolitan Hopes in the Films of Globalisation (Peter Lang, 2023), in the Ralahine Utopian Studies series; chapters in the edited collections Global London on Screen (Manchester University Press, 2023) and Post-Apocalyptic Cultures (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); and articles on the films Children of Men, The Hunger Games series and The East.

I hold an MA in Film Studies from University College London and a PhD in English Studies and Film from the University of Zaragoza. I have also been a postgraduate scholar at Royal Holloway and King’s College, University of London.

E-mail: monicam@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7565-8400

Dr Julia Echeverría Domingo

Lecturer in English Studies at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. I am the author of Epidemic Cinema: The Rise of a Genre (Routledge, 2024) and have published articles and book chapters on the epidemic horror genre, transnational filmmakers such as Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, and female prison television series from a cosmopolitan perspective. I am co-editor of Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema (Routledge, 2025), alongside María del Mar Azcona and Pablo Gómez-Muñoz. My current research focuses on the representation of spaces in the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos.

E-mail: juliaed@unizar.es
Bluesky: juliaecheverria.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3483-5271

Dr Andrea Regueira Martín

Lecturer in English Studies at the Department of English and German of the of the University of Zaragoza, Spain. My research focuses on onscreen depictions of youth identities, with particular emphasis on the lengthening transition to adulthood, cinematic representations of virtual spaces in coming-of-age films, and the relationship between girlhood and technology in film and television. My PhD dissertation, “Growing Up Is Hard to Do: The Rise of the Emerging Adult Film” (2022), examines how cinema depicts the changing path to contemporary adulthood. My recent publications, all from 2025, include chapters in the edited collections Sex Education: School’s Out for Netflix, Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema and Authoring Female Identities in Spanish and Latin American Art and Media. I have also published articles on Eighth Grade, Black Mirror and Booksmart, among others.

E-mail: andrearm@unizar.es
Bluesky: andrearm.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0635-1085
Website: https://andrearm.weebly.com

Dr Isabel Treviño López

Lecturer at the Centro Universitario de la Defensa de Zaragoza. In 2023, I completed my PhD in English Studies at the University of Zaragoza, with a dissertation on the representation of mobile professional women in 21^st-century cinema. I hold a degree in English Studies and a Master’s in Textual Analysis in Film and Literature Studies.

My research interests include the cinematic portrayal of mobilities and spaces, with a focus on women’s professional mobilities and how these intersect with the broader representation of women’s identities.

E-mail: isabeltrevi@unizar.es
Bluesky: isabeltrevi.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1779-990X

Dr Andrés Buesa Artal

Lecturer in English Studies at the Department of English and German of the University of Zaragoza (Spain). My PhD thesis, entitled Mobilities and the Child in 21st Century World Cinema, discussed contemporary fiction films that engage with the interrelation between mobility and power through the figure of the innocent child. My work on the intersection between childhood, cinema, and space has been published on the international journals Atlantis (2022), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film (2023), and Sociology Lens (2023), as well as on Routledge’s edited collection Embodying VulnerAbilities in Literature and Film (2023) and Bloomsbury’s Radical Embodiment on Film: Time and the Cinematic Body (2026).

I hold a BA in English Studies from the University of Zaragoza, where I also completed a BA in Hispanic Philology, and an MA in Film and Television Studies from the University of Warwick. I’ve been a visiting scholar at the University of Glasgow (United Kingdom) and the Università di Padova (Italy). Further research interests include film aesthetics, the representation of cities and landscapes in contemporary film, and Spanish and Latin American cinemas, among others.

As a film programmer, I am part of the selection committee of La Mirada Tabú since 2019, and I collaborate with Universitarios con la Infancia in organising an annual film cycle on Film and Children’s Rights since 2023.

E-mail: abuesa@unizar.es
Bluesky: abuesa.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3601-6560
Website: https://andresbuesa.wordpress.com/

Prof. Celestino Deleyto Alcalá

Retired professor of Film Studies and English at the University of Zaragoza. I have published widely on film genre, comedy and transnational cinema. My books include, among others, The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy (Manchester University Press, 2009), From Tinseltown to Bordertown: Los Angeles on Film (Wayne State University Press, 2016) and Before Sunrise: Young Love on the Move (Routledge, 2023), co-written with M. Mar Azcona. Among my articles and book chapters are “Humor, Erotic Utopia and the Intimate Scenarios of Romantic Comedy,” in Andrew Horton and Joanna Rapf, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Film Comedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 175-95, “Looking from the Border: A Cosmopolitan Approach to Contemporary Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas, 8.2 (2017), 95-112, “The Multiple Trajectories of Transnational Hollywood Stars: Marion Cotillard, Kristen Stewart, Diane Kruger”, in Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s (Steven Rybin, ed., Rutgers U.P., 2022), “Romantic, Transnational and Messy: Intimate Spaces/Cosmopolitan Spaces in Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong“, in Imagining “We” in the Age of “I”: Romance and Social Bonding in Contemporary Culture (Mary Harrod, Suzanne Leonard and Diane Negra, eds., Routledge, 2022), “Transnational Marseille: Film Space and Layers of History in Transit“. Transnational Screens, 2025, and “The Good, the Bad and the Real: The Many Faces of the Cosmopolitan,” (co-written with María del Mar Azcona, in Azcona, María del Mar, Echeverría, Julia and Gómez-Muñoz, Pablo, eds. Cosmopolitan Aspirations in Contemporary Cinema, Routledge, 2025, 1-17. My current research deals with cinematic space and Mediterranean cities, particularly in the context of border films and cities, as well as cosmopolitan theory and transnational cinema.

E-mail: cdeleyto@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3087-4556

Prof. Rob Stone

Emeritus Professor of Film Studies at the University of Birmingham in the UK. I am the author of Spanish Cinema (Longman, 2001), Flamenco in the Works of Federico García Lorca and Carlos Saura (Edwin Mellen, 2004), Julio Medem (Manchester University Press, 2007), The Cinema of Richard Linklater: Walk, Don’t Run (Columbia University Press, 2013; 2nd edition 2018) and Lady Bird: Self-Determination for a New Century (Routledge, 2022), and co-author of Basque Cinema: A Cultural and Political History (I. B. Tauris, 2015) and Cine Vasco (Fundación Social, 2015). I also co-edited The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film (Columbia University Press, 2007), Screening Songs, in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (Manchester University Press, 2012), A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Screening European Heritage (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), The Routledge Companion to World Cinema (Routledge, 2017), Sense8: Transcending Television (2018) and Sex Education: School’s Out for Netflix (Bloomsbury, 2024). My research interests cover European and American independent cinema with particular emphasis on the relations between aesthetics, politics and philosophy and I am a filmmaker and video essayist too. My latest book is Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) and my co-edited second edition of The Routledge Companion to World Cinema will be published by Routledge in 2027.

E-mail: r.stone@bham.ac.uk
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3621-5794

Dr Sara Pesce

Associate Professor of Film and Performance Studies at the University of Bologna. I am co-founder of INC – the Italian Research Network on Celebrity Culture – and I promote interdisciplinary approaches to celebrity studies that include insights into fashion, ageing, and gender studies. In this field, I recently published Isabella Rossellini’s Assertive Marginality: A Sustainable Paradigm in Contemporary Ageing Culture (Mediascapes, 2025). My research spans the film history of Italy and the U.S.—from Hollywood’s Jewish founders (Dietro lo schermo, 2005) to World War II in Italian cinema (Memoria e immaginario, 2008). My work on acting and stardom appears in journals (e.g., Film, Fashion & Consumption) and edited collections, as well as in a monograph on Laurence Olivier (Laurence Olivier nei film, 2012). I have also edited and written volumes on film melodrama (Imitazioni della vita, 2007) and on time, memory, and paratextual media (The Politics of Ephemeral Digital Media, 2015). I am currently completing a book on performance in audiovisual media.

E-mail: sara.pesce@unibo.it
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1399-3238

Dr Costanza Salvi

Tutor and adjunct professor at the University of Bologna, specializing in classical Hollywood cinema and cultural studies. My research explores the cultural foundations of American national cinema from a transnational perspective. I am currently writing a book on the classic Western, focusing on the significant influence of Mexican culture on the genre.

I graduated in 2015 with a degree in Cinema, Television, and Multimedia Production from the University of Bologna (MA). I then completed a PhD in English Studies, specializing in Transnational Cinema and Cosmopolitanism, at the University of Zaragoza in Spain.

I’ve been a member of the research project TRAFFIC (University of Bergamo), which traces American and foreign funds in Italian cinema in the post-war era. I have presented my research at leading conferences in Italy and internationally, and conducted archival investigations in the United States at the Harry Ransom Center (Austin) and at key Los Angeles institutions, including the Margaret Herrick Library and the Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study. I have been an active member of SERCIA (Société d’Etudes et de Recherche sur le Cinéma Anglophone) since 2017 and SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) since 2020.

E-mail: costanza.salvi2@unibo.it
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-2607-9098

Dr Luis Freijo

Research Associate in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London (United Kingdom). I am a member of the postdoctoral team in the research project AGE-C: Ageing and Gender in European Cinema (2023-2027), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, in which I research questions of ageing, gender and stardom in Europe. My research interests also include the dynamics of World Cinema as it relates to genre studies and, in particular, the global Western.

I obtained my PhD in Film Studies in 2022 from the University of Birmingham, where I also worked as a postgraduate teaching associate. I have also held a post as a University Teacher at the University of Liverpool (2022-2023). I am the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled The Western in World Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2028), co-author of the dataset ‘Ageing and Gender in European Cinema’ (2025), and co-editor of the special issue #ageing for the journal NECSUS (2026). I have co-authored new theorisations of World Cinema in the journal Transnational Screens (2021, 2023). I have also contributed a number of chapters in English and Spanish to academic publications, including Sense8: Transcending Television (Bloomsbury, 2021), The Routledge Companion to European Cinema (2022), Screening the Crisis: U.S. Cinema and Social Change in the Wake of the 2008 Crash (Bloomsbury, 2022), El Oeste sin fronteras: El imaginario del Western en la cultura española contemporánea (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2026), Decolonising the Moving Image in Southern Cinemas (Intellect, 2027), and The Routledge Companion to World Cinema, 2nd Edition (2027). I also have a background as a journalist in Spain in written press, radio and, especially, television, where I worked for the Telecinco show Qué tiempo tan feliz (2015-2017).

E-mail: luis.freijo@kcl.ac.uk
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2618-4779

Dr Fernando Sánchez López

I have been awarded a Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship, which I will begin in the Department of English and German at the University of Zaragoza (Spain) in the last quarter of 2026. I hold a PhD in Iberian and Film Studies from The Ohio State University, with a dissertation focused on post-crisis Spanish neo-noir as a transnational genre of particular sociocultural significance within what I termed the “culture of outrage”. My research interests in Film Studies focus primarily on the relationship between film genre and society, transnational cinema, and textual analysis. Some of my work has been published in various book chapters and academic journals such as Transnational Screens (2023), Secuencias: Revista de historia del cine (2023), Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies (2025), and Comparative Cinema (2025).

I hold a BA in English Studies and an MA in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the University of Salamanca (Spain), as well as an MA in Iberian and Film Studies from The Ohio State University (United States). I was also a visiting scholar in the Department of Communication at University Jaume I (Spain).

As for my current work as a postdoctoral researcher, I am focusing on the most recent developments in the Western, examining its aesthetics and discursive strategies.

E-mail: drfernandosanlop@gmail.com
Bluesky: fersanchezlop.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1672-1799
Website: https://sites.google.com/view/fernandosanchezlopez/

Victoria Santamaría Ibor

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Zaragoza. I hold a degree in English Studies (with Distinctions) from the University of Zaragoza. My PhD thesis explores spatial abjection in contemporary horror cinema, in which I intend to shift the focus from the psychoanalytical perspective on abjection related to motherhood and femininity to other forms of abjection that include social exclusion and structural decay. My research interests include horror cinema, spatial theory, affects, technology and globalization.

E-mail: vsantamaria@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0326-345X

Claudia Aguas Albero

PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. I hold a BA in English Studies from the University of Zaragoza. I also received an MA in Screenwriting for Film & Television Series from the Rey Juan Carlos University (Madrid). My PhD thesis analyses the spaces of the transnational in Penelope Cruz’s cinema. I’ve been a visiting scholar at the University of Liverpool (United Kingdom). My research interests include transnational stardom, the representation of motherhood and of the mother-daughter relationship in contemporary cinema, and the construction of personal identity in films.

Besides this, and often relatedly, I am a screenwriter and I have worked mostly on animated feature films.

E-mail: caguas@unizar.es
Bluesky: claudiaguas.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0004-3342-494X

Carmen Navarro

PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. I hold a BA in English Studies and a Master’s Degree in Secondary Education Teaching, both from the University of Zaragoza. My prior background also includes a BA in Fine Arts from the University of Zaragoza and a Higher Technician Diploma in Lighting, Image Capture and Digital Imaging. My PhD thesis explores the representation of London in contemporary cinema, with other research interests spanning British cinema, urban and spatial theory, personal identity, and the intersections of psychology and sociology in film.

E-mail: carmen.navarro@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-4355-9408

Clara Revilla Lahoz

PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza. I hold a BA in Infant Education Teaching and a MA in Lifelong Learning & Research (University of Zaragoza, Spain). My main research interests include film education, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, care ethics, Studio Ghibli, utopian studies, and Japanese cinema. My PhD thesis explores the representation of caring ecofeminist aspirations in Studio Ghibli films, exploring how they can serve as pedagogical tools to articulate a humanistic, utopian horizon beyond consumerism and self-sufficiency. I embrace a transnational and utopian perspective, concentrating on the inspiring ecofeminist spaces and modes of being these films illustrate.

E-mail: crevilla@unizar.es
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9696-0528

Elena Velilla Gonzalvo

PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Zaragoza, where I also completed a BA in English Studies and an MA in Secondary Education Teaching. My doctoral research focuses on the cinematic representation of Toronto, particularly on how the city is constructed as a filmic and cultural space in contemporary cinema. My research interests include Canadian cinema, film and urban studies, and the relationship between space, place and cinematic representation, with a particular focus on cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, and urban and Canadian identities. In 2026, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Toronto, where I conducted research on the topic of my dissertation and engaged with scholars and archival resources in Cinema Studies.

E-mail: evelilla@unizar.es
Bluesky: elenavg.bsky.social
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-5286-6163