Dean Allbritton

Education

Ph.D., Stony Brook University (2011)
M.A., Syracuse University (2004)
B.A., Valdosta State University (2002)

Areas of Expertise

• Contemporary Spanish Visual Cultures

• Illness & Disability Studies

• Queer Studies

• Cultural Studies

Personal Information

Dean Allbritton is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Colby College, where he teaches courses on Spanish visual culture, illness, and gender and sexuality. His work examines linkages between sex, sickness, and health in contemporary Spanish visual culture and adult media. He is also the Director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Colby College, where he is responsible for a number of campus-wide programs and initiatives. His monograph, Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain, explores the cultural history of HIV/AIDS in Spain through visual culture and ephemera of the time and was published by Liverpool University Press in May 2023. He has published articles in Porn Studies, The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Revista de estudios hispánicos, and Hispanic Research Journal, among others.

Current Research

My book project, Feeling Sick: The Early Years of AIDS in Spain, examines the cultural history of the early years of AIDS in Spain (1981-1987) as it has been told through television and print media, ephemeral products of visual culture, fiction film, and the so-called risk groups that lived through the epidemic. The earliest traceable accounts of the AIDS outbreak in Spain began to emerge during its political transition to democracy, which began with the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in 1975 and lasted through the early 1980s. The return to this time period allows us to consider HIV/AIDS in Spain as an epidemic of modernity, one that shifted the promise of capitalism and globalization into a threat and challenged the hope that deeper cross-cultural connections would inherently bring freedom, health, and wealth. By critically evaluating the historicity of AIDS, I claim that the earliest years of the epidemic open up common fears about global connectivity, the proliferation of vulnerable ties to others, and the potential of cultural and physical contaminations. Ultimately, this book challenges the dominant narratives in which recent Spanish history and AIDS are seen as separate and unequal, and in which illness is only destructive and devastating; I advocate instead for the twinning of illness and history, along with a more capacious understanding of what sickness can do and mean for the present.

Select Publications

BOOKS

Feeling Sick: The Early Years of HIV/AIDS in Spain. Liverpool University Press, 2023.

Allbritton, Dean, Alejandro Melero, and Tom Whittaker, eds. Performance and Spanish film. Manchester University Press, 2016.

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS

“Unraveling Time: Queer Future and Trans Entanglement in Veneno”. The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Spain: Ideas, Practices, Imaginings, co-edited by L. Elena Delgado and Eduardo Ledesma. London: Routledge. (Forthcoming 2023)

“The Spanish Obscenities of Bruce LaBruce”. Porn Studies, November 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2022.2101508

“It Came from California: The AIDS Origin Story in Spain.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 50.1, March 2016, pp. 143-66.

“Timing Out: The Politics of Death and Gender in Almodóvar’s Volver.” Hispanic Research Journal, 16.1, 2015, pp. 49-64.

“Recovering Childhood: Virulence, Ghosts, and Black Bread.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 91.6, 2014, pp. 619-36.

“Prime Risks: The Politics of Pain and Suffering in Spanish Crisis Cinema.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15.1-2, 2014, pp. 101-15.

“Paternity & Pathogens: Mourning Men and the Crises of Masculinity in Almodóvar.” A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar. Marvin D’Lugo and Kathleen Vernon, eds. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 225-43.