Aurelie Vialette specializes in 19th-century Iberian cultural studies (popular music, journalistic discourse, archival studies, and mass and working class organizations). She conducts research in Spanish, Catalan, Basque, and Galician.
Her first book, “Intellectual Philanthropists: the Seduction of the Masses” is forthcoming at Purdue University Press (2018). She focus on the cultural production that responds to the workers’ educational and social phenomena, such as poverty, the rise of revolutionary movements, and the integration of masses of workers into the cultural, political, and social concert in 19th-century Iberia (Catalonia, Basque Country, Asturias, Galicia).
Her second book project is titled “Disposable Bodies: Penitentiary Colonization and the Failed Rebirth of the Spanish Empire” explores primary sources about the carceral system that unveil crucial contemporary issues regarding criminality, imprisonment, and mass incarceration. The proposals to reform the penitentiary system in the nineteenth-century included issues that our civil society is constantly examining: the prisoners’ labor, their education in prison, juvenile crime, or questions that are similar to the “broken windows policy.” Architecture, the use of prison buildings, and the modes of life of prisoners, were also discussed –questions that resonate deeply with the issue of mass incarceration. She explores the human aspect of banishment implied in penal colonization, and examine and historicize the carceral archipelago as a space of exception.
She also has a strong interest in Digital Humanities and am working on a project that explores the musical archives she has included in her book. The project, built with Omeka and Neatline, will be available soon at avialette.com. Finally, she is also interested and have published on the journalistic networks by women writers between Mexico and Spain in the second half of the nineteenth-century.