Xavier Dapena

Xavier Dapena is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Director of World Film Studies at Iowa State University. He received his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and a Graduate Certificate in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Mellon Research Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center.

His research is situated at the intersection of Iberian cultural studies, visual culture, and media studies and examines how graphic narrative, cinema, television, digital media, and emerging visual forms shape political imagination, collective agency, and contemporary forms of social life. Bringing together cultural theory, film and media studies, comics studies, and environmental humanities, his work investigates questions of democratic participation, social movements, migration, care, precarity, ecology, and the commons across contemporary Iberian visual cultures.

Dapena is the author of Nobody Expects the Spanish Revolution: Graphic Narrative in Contemporary Spain (under contract with Liverpool University Press), a study of graphic narrative as a site of political imagination and social theory in post-15M Spain. His second book project, Cinematic Commons: Landscape, visuality and Commons in Iberian Film, explores how cinema engages the cultural, political, and ecological imaginaries of the commons through questions of landscape, environmental struggle, and collective life.

His recent publications include studies of graphic narrative, migration, disability, care, streaming cultures, GIF aesthetics, ecocinema, and political imagination in venues such as Hispanic Review, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Hispania, Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, and Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies. Current and forthcoming work examines animated GIFs and visual vulnerability, migratory aesthetics and kinopolitics, ecocinematic landscapes, commons theory, and genealogies of protest in contemporary Iberian visual cultures.

Beyond his individual scholarship, Dapena has helped shape emerging conversations in Iberian visual culture through collaborative editorial and research initiatives. He is co-editor of The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative (Routledge, 2023) and Streaming Spain and Mexico: Hispanic TV Fiction (Liverpool University Press, forthcoming), founder of the Hispanic Comic Studies Collective and the Iberian Comics Lab, and serves on the Executive Committee of the Modern Language Association’s 20th- and 21st-Century Spanish and Iberian Forum. His work has been supported by competitive fellowships and research awards.