Robert Sanchis-Álvarez

TIMELINE

2023 — Barcelona
A surviving issue was located in private circulation.2024 — Barcelona
The newspaper was digitized at the University of Barcelona and prepared for transfer.2025 — Manila
Conservation work was undertaken at the Ateneo de Manila University Archives.May 2025 — Iloilo
The newspaper was formally returned during a public symposium and archival turnover ceremony at UP Visayas.2026 — Iloilo
The newspaper was exhibited by the UPV Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage.

SELECTED COVERAGE

Philippine press
Rappler · Daily Guardian Iloilo
Philippine Daily Inquirer · Manila BulletinInstitutional coverage
National Museum PH - Iloilo
University of Virginia Today

ON DISPLAY IN ILOILOFollowing its transfer to CWVS, El Látigo Nacional was exhibited in 2026 by the UPV Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage, bringing the recovered newspaper into public view in López Jaena’s home region.

FORTHCOMING EDITIONCalambur Editorial · under contractThe critical facsimile will reproduce the surviving 1893 issue in full, accompanied by an English translation. It will also include my critical introduction and contributions from UP Visayas faculty such as Chancellor Clement Camposano and CWVS, continuing the institutional collaboration that made the newspaper’s return possible.

In December 1899, a Catalan-language periodical appeared in Manila. Published by the Centre Català de Manila amid the transition from Spanish to American rule, Sempre Avant–Avant Sempre offered a printed form for imagining Catalonia from overseas.Printed Catalonia in Manila reconstructs the print ecology that developed around this periodical and other Catalan publications produced in the Philippines between 1885 and 1930. Bringing together printed matter, images, advertisements, associational records, and archival fragments preserved across Manila, Cavite, Barcelona, and Valladolid, the project examines how Catalan self-representation was sustained by the archipelago’s commercial and colonial infrastructures and traces the selective forms through which the Philippines entered these publications. The corpus’s uneven preservation is also part of the argument, shaping what can now be recovered of this cultural formation.

Cover of Sempre Avant–Avant Sempre, Manila, 1899.

• EMAIL

I am a PhD candidate in Spanish at the University of Virginia, with additional training in urban history and design at the UVA School of Architecture. My work examines the cultural and material worlds of nineteenth-century Spain and the Philippines, bringing literary and cultural studies into conversation with architectural history and archival practice.My dissertation, Beyond Empire’s Reach: Microgeographies of Empire in the Colonial Philippines, argues that stairs, service passages, balconies, thresholds, ruins, and other seemingly minor spaces constituted microgeographies of empire: everyday spatial technologies through which colonial power organized mobility, labor, visibility, and social hierarchy. Reading narratives from Spain and the Philippines alongside architectural and archival materials, the dissertation shows how these spaces helped produce and contest colonial rule in daily life. It also treats the archive as one of the material institutions through which colonial realities were produced and preserved.Alongside the dissertation, I develop archival and public humanities projects concerned with how documents and collections move between institutions, and with the politics of custody and public access. In 2025, I co-organized the return of El Látigo Nacional (Barcelona, 1893), a Filipino reformist newspaper edited by Graciano López Jaena, from Barcelona to Iloilo. A related project reconstructs Catalan print culture in the Philippines through periodicals dispersed across archives in Spain and the Philippines.

How did colonial power become embedded in the minor spaces of everyday life? Beyond Empire’s Reach examines the nineteenth-century Philippines through architectural forms that have often remained at the margins of imperial history. It traces how stairs, service passages, balconies, thresholds, and ruins organized movement and labor, made social distinctions visible, and created openings through which colonial order could be negotiated or evaded.The project places narratives from Spain and the Philippines in dialogue with legal disputes, architectural plans, newspapers, visual culture, and the surviving built environment. The archive emerges here as a material institution whose categories and practices helped constitute the social realities they purported to document. Together, these materials reveal empire as an uneven spatial process assembled through ordinary arrangements whose effects extended beyond the reach of formal institutions.

"El Látigo Nacional Returns"
Bilingual Critical Edition and FacsimileProject Director and Critical Editor
Under contract with Calambur Editorial

This forthcoming volume recovers the copy of Graciano López Jaena’s El Látigo Nacional repatriated from Barcelona to Iloilo in 2025. It brings together the original 1893 newspaper, a complete English translation, a critical introduction, and bilingual contributions examining its historical, material, and archival afterlives.

At the University of Virginia, my courses range from beginning language instruction to advanced work in literature and cultural studies. They include professional Spanish, textual interpretation, Spain and the Global Hispanophone, with particular attention to the Philippines and its Southeast Asian and Pacific contexts.Across these courses, students move among literary texts, visual culture, and material objects, pursuing questions that develop over the semester. In upper-level courses, their notebooks gradually become “critical archives,” in which new readings reshape earlier ones and unexpected connections emerge. Museum and archives visits and conversations beyond the classroom bring other forms of knowledge into this process. I combine clear instruction with discussion and reflective writing, helping students become attentive and independent readers.

Discussing Goya’s Los Caprichos at the Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, 2025.

Perspectives on Modern Spain follows Spanish literature and culture from the late eighteenth century to the present. Its geography extends beyond the Peninsula. The course treats Spain as an imperial formation whose institutions and cultural life took shape across the Peninsula and the Philippines, places drawn into the same imperial project from unequal positions. Writing produced there belongs to the history of Spain and often challenges the terms in which that history has been told.Students read literary works alongside maps, paintings, architecture, film, radio, and archival documents. Their notebooks become critical archives over the semester, preserving work from different weeks so that it can be rearranged and reread. The final weeks turn to fragmented memory and to what survives outside the official record.

Torres Villegas, Mapa político de España (1852), distinguishing España uniforme, España asimilada, España colonial, and España foral.

Close-reading notes on José Rizal’s Noli me tángere.

Archival workshop notes alongside a source-based essay reading Primo de Rivera’s 1923 manifesto in relation to texts by Clara Campoamor and Miguel Hernández.