Monica Alonso Riveiro

Monica Alonso Riveiro is a journalist with a bachelor's degree and a PhD in Art History. She is a researcher and lecturer at the UNED. Her main areas of interest are photography theory, visual and material culture, and memory studies. Her research analyzes the relationship between image, experience, and memory, with a particular focus on domestic photographs of the Republican community during the Franco regime. 

The project

Title: Refugee childhoods. Exposed bodies, hidden gazes

"The project "Refugee Childhoods: Exposed Bodies, Hidden Gazes" was funded by a mobility grant from the Spanish Ministry of Culture as part of the program "Ayudas para estancias de movilidad en el extranjero José Castillejo para jóvenes doctores" (Grants for Mobility Stays Abroad José Castillejo for Young Doctors), at the invitation of the Laboratoire d'Études Romanes (LER) at the University of Paris 8. This project is part of a larger research project I am currently working on, entitled “Enfances en guerre” (Childhoods in War), which addresses the relationship between photography and childhood in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The first result of this project will be the publication of a chapter in a monograph devoted to the relationship between images and the Spanish Civil War. The text will be published by a prestigious publishing house in 2026, and the work to be carried out during the residency will enable me to complete it by incorporating images of refugee children in France. Thematically, the research addresses an issue (the relationship between photography, war, and childhood) that has already been the subject of numerous studies, particularly in the fields of history and the history of photography, with valuable contributions that nevertheless have certain gaps that the project seeks to fill by compiling a corpus of often-neglected documents and adopting new approaches. To this end, the research will focus on two main areas.First, she will address the issue of refugee children's exposure through photographic images, taking into account the continuation of this exposure in the present through the reproduction of photographs. Next, she will examine the childhood experience and, above all, children's perspectives and points of view as a source of alternative knowledge. To this end, a corpus of often unexploited photographic documents from the private sphere will be incorporated into the research, in line with her previous work. "

Hosting institution: Laboratoire d'Études Romanes (LER) - Université de Paris 8

Selective Bibliography

• Políticas de la experiencia. Visualidad y memoria del franquismo, Madrid, Abada, 2025 (coédité avec Inés Plasencia et Lidia Mateo Leivas)
• Mateo Leivas, Lidia; Alonso Riveiro, Mónica y de Kerangat, Zoé (eds.), Culturas de la memoria en España. Genealogías, evocaciones y contratiempos, Madrid, Catarata, 2024 (coédité avec Lidia Mateo Leivas et Zoé de Kerangat).
• Habitar la imagen. Fotografía doméstica y poéticas de la resistencia en la posguerra. Murcia, CENDEAC, 2022.
•  « La vida posible de las cosas. Exilio, imaginación histórica y formas de posesión », Kamchatka. Revista de análisis cultural. Dossier La memoria de las cosas. Cultura material y vida cotidiana durante el franquismo 18 (2021): pp. 71-99.