Isabel-Maura Burdiel - Biography#

Since the early 1980s my main focus of interest has been the political and cultural history of European Nineteenth-century liberalism. Through the strategic mingling of various brands of analysis (both national, international and loca; social, political and cultural), I contributed at the forefront of the break of Spanish historiography with the traditional paradigm of debility, failure and exceptionality. My article in the Journal of Modern History (1998. See CV) was considered at the time a key turning point in this regard. A fundamental part in this historiographic renovation was played by a cross-referenced interpretation of the developments of European historiography on liberalism, the transnationality of problems and responses, and the involvement of the cultural and biographical approach along with the vigorous analytic power of the category of gender.

Since the early 1990s, my work has been pioneer in the renovation of the studies on 19th-century European constitutional monarchies, bringing together political and cultural analysis and going beyond the traditional field of studies of the so-called"performing monarchies". My biography on Queen Isabel II (2010) offers a good example of that the potential of intersecting historical scales, brands of analysis, scales, spheres and timed. This book won the Spanish National Prize for History and will soon be published in French.

Throughout my career I have been interested in the integration of literary materials into the understanding and writing of history (far removerd fron any purely referectial approach. See for instance my critical edition and essay on Frankenstein, 1996. et.al) and the heruristic potential of biographical history in clearly renewed ways. My article "La dama de Blanco: Notas sobre la biografía histórica" (2000) has been considered of outstanding impact in the field. A recent long essay on the new paths of political biography ("Historia política y biografía: Más allá de las fronteras, 2014) defends the methodological and heuristc potential of biography to restore the links and common purposes of sociocultural and political history and contibute to the renovation of traditional fields of research as the histories of liberalism, nationalism,monarchies, empires, etc.

Since 2008 I direct the European Network on the Theory and Practice of Bigraphy: http://www.valencia.edu/retpb