Assistant Professor
Language Program Director
Major Advisor
213a Milbank Hall
Ext. 4-8713
iestrada@barnard.edu

Prof. Estrada received her B.A. from the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain, an M.A. in Romance Languages and Literature from the University of Michigan, and her Ph.D. in Modern Spanish Literature from Columbia University in 1999.  Before she joined the Barnard faculty in 2003, she taught at Middlebury College, where her work as an advisor to students made her understand that mentoring is a fundamental part of the liberal arts education, an understanding that informs her teaching philosophy in the present.
Since the beginning of her academic career, the impact of the civil war and dictatorship on twentieth-century Spanish cultural production-specifically literature, film, and documentary-has been her principal area of research. Her current book-length project, entitled Visual Memory: The Documentary Genre and the Formation of National Identity in Democratic Spain (1995-2005), examines how a selected group of documentaries made since 1995 for both film and television inform the debate centered on the so-called "recuperation of memory" of the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship.  This work considers these documentaries to be discursive manifestations that come to modify Spanish identity as it was conceived by the teleological historical project of the transition.  Her analysis uncovers the theoretical bases and epistemological problems of the documentary genre in order to emphasize the interpretive possibilities it poses.
She has contributed to the volumes Approaches to Teaching the Works of Carmen Martín Gaite (PMLA 2009), Perceptions of the Holocaust in Modern Spanish Culture (Leipzig Studies on Jewish History and Culture, 2009), and  Historias de la pequeña pantalla: Representaciones históricas en la televisión de la España democrática (2008).  She has also published articles in journals such as Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Hispanic Review, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, España Contemporánea,Catalan Review, and Revista Hispánica Moderna.  She has served as a reviewer for Yale University Press, Hispanic Review, the Modern Language Association, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies and The City University of New York (University Committee on Research Awards).