Miguel Ángel Blanco Martínez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures (LAIC) and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS) at Columbia University. He holds dual Bachelor’s Degrees in Humanities and Translation-Interpreting from Universidad Pablo de Olavide, and a GEMMA Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Universidad de Oviedo and Utrecht University. Throughout his doctoral studies, he has served as a Teaching Fellow at LAIC and has been awarded scholarships from the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities (SOF/HCH), the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), and the Arts and Science Graduate Council (ASGC) at Columbia University.
His dissertation offers a panoramic understanding of the most representative political subjects, cultural debates, and artistic practices in contemporary Spain. Using the analytical framework of “artivism,” his research traces the evolution of social mobilization, from the 15M movement in the early 2010s to the International Women’s Strikes at the turn of the decade and beyond. Drawing on Cultural Studies, Feminist Studies, Critical Race Studies, Performance Studies, and the Sociology of Social Movements, his work engages with a dynamic archive of cultural artifacts – ranging from demonstration banners, grassroots manifestos, graffiti, performances, music, to photography. These materials facilitate dialogues between Spain’s historical present and critical discourses on feminism, queerness, and antiracism.
His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Histories, or The Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies. In addition to academic publishing, he is deeply committed to Public Humanities and activist-academic dissemination. Since 2023, he has served as a Public Humanities Fellow at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University, collaborating with his LAIC colleague and friend, Mónica Alejandra Ramírez Bernal. Together, they work with El Diario de los Delivery Boys, a New York City-based grassroots collective advocating for the labor rights of migrant Indigenous Mexican delivery workers. Their initiative combines social justice and critical cartography to improve delivery worker’s safety in the city, a project awarded the 2024 MLA Public Humanities Incubator.
In parallel, Miguel Ángel is an Editorial and Conference Collective member of LAPES (Latin American Philosophy of Education Society), where he has co-organized a symposium and co-edited a volume on Feminist Pedagogies. He has also served as a coordinator of a working group on debt and education in Latin America at Columbia’s Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS), where he co-organized a conference series on activism against debt.
Social justice values profoundly shape Miguel Ángel’s teaching philosophy, which emphasizes diversity, inclusion, and critical methodologies. He practices a pedagogy of care, bridging language, culture, research, and instruction to create socially engaged learning experiences. As a LAIC Teaching Fellow, he has taught a range of courses, including:
- Spanish Language Courses: Elementary Spanish II and Intermediate Spanish I, using the hybrid textbook Proyectos.
- Content Course: Hispanic Cultures II, exploring the cultural history of modern Spain, Latin America, and the Caribbean.
- Advanced Spanish Through Content – Self-Designed Course: Feminist Artivisms in Spain, integrating his research into language instruction.
In 2024, he was awarded the Lead Teaching Fellowship from Columbia’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), through which he organizes pedagogical workshops at LAIC to support fellow graduate instructors. Furthermore, in the summer of 2022 he served as an undergraduate mentor in the Laidlaw Scholars Program at Columbia University, which introduces students to research. His mentorship approach incorporated research diaries, group meetings, field trips, andone-on-one office hours.
As an undergraduate student himself, Miguel Ángel participated in several academic exchanges at Bonn University, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Mount Royal University, Universidad de Salamanca, and Universidade de Brasília. This transnational training shaped his interdisciplinary and collaborative understanding of learning, teaching, and researching. In addition to Spanish and English, he is fluent in German and Portuguese and has a basic knowledge of Japanese and French.
