Director of the Public History Program and the Texas Center for Public History
NEH Distinguished Professor in the Humanities
Associate Professor of Digital History
Email: LValencia@txstate.edu
Socials: Instagram & Twitter
Research Interests
Europe; Spain; fascism; antiauthoritarianism; youth culture; historical memory and myth; digital history and social media; music, film, and visual culture; popular culture and celebrity; urban spaces and the environment
Biography
Dr. Louie Dean Valencia is the Director of the Public History Program and the Texas Center for Public History (TCPH) at Texas State University. Dr. Valencia earned a Ph.D. in Early and Late Modern European History from Fordham University in New York City and studies countercultures, myth-making, and how young people create social change through counternarratives, technology, art, culture, print and social media, celebrity, and public spaces. Before joining Texas State, Dr. Valencia was a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York. He serves as the Honors LLC Faculty-in-Residence.
As a teenager, Dr. Valencia ran off in search of Caravaggio paintings, backpacking around Europe, encountering strangers, and attending festivals with Hare Krishnas; he was never quite the same. He began developing and selling musician websites in middle school—selling his first website in high school. He has worked as a digital strategy analyst and consultant on major digital projects and campaigns, including PepsiCo, Patrón, LOFT, and GOOP.
His books include Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History (2020) and Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain (2018). He is a member of the Emotions in European Politics network and serves on the editorial boards of Popular Culture Review, Modern History of Politics and Violence, and Revista Internacional de Estudios sobre Terrorismo. Currently, Dr. Valencia is finishing his forthcoming book, “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity” and is working on a six-volume series on the deep history of countercultures from antiquity to the present, to be published as part of Bloomsbury’s Cultural Histories series.
Dr. Valencia directs “Night of Ideas” at Texas State—co-organized with the Embassy of France. The programming brings together community leaders, innovators, artists, students, and scholars for a night of ideas, music, art, film, dialogue, and workshops focused on topics related to storytelling, technology, media, artificial intelligence, the environment, and youth culture. Dr. Valencia teaches his internationally recognized course, “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, Internet, and European Pop Culture,” at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford.
Dr. Valencia has received fellowships and grants from the United States Library of Congress, the Spanish Ministry of Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Santander Bank, amongst others.
As an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, he was a museum educator, curated exhibitions such as Carl Van Vechten: Photographing the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, contributed to the permanent exhibition, New York at Its Core, organized pop-up exhibitions, and was one of the two primary organizers of History Day for the entirety of New York City.
He is a fan of Superman comic books, kebabs, Shawn Mendes, Stranger Things, Arthur Rimbaud, coffee shops, New Wave music, photography, cinema, side quests, and traveling.
Select Publications
Longer Works
- Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain: Clashing with Fascism, Bloomsbury Academic, May 2018.
- Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History: Alt/Histories, Routledge 2020.
- “Imagining, Thinking, and Teaching Europe” in EuropeNow (2020).
Select Journal Articles
- “Images and Ethics in Social Media Research.” Article in First Monday. Nicole Taylor, Louie Dean Valencia, Alejandro Allen. 2023.
- “Pluralism at the Twilight of Franco’s Spain: Antifascist Practice and Methodologies.” Article in Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies. Brill, 2020.
- “Locating Dictatorship in the Anthropocene: Historiographic Trends in the History of Science and Technology and the Study of European Authoritarianism.” State-of-the-field essay in Contemporary European History, Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Select Book Chapters
- “European Histories, Australian Anxieties: The Christchurch Killer in Context.” In The Politics of Replacement Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories, and Race Wars. Jack Wilson and Louie Dean Valencia, edited By Sarah Bracke, Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar. London: Routledge, 2023.
- “MMMBop: From Analogue to Digital, Oklahoma to the Internet.” In One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song, edited by Asif Siddiqi. New York: Palgrave, 2022.
- “Empire and Civil Rights in Franco’s Spain.” In Rethinking Spain’s Atlantic Empire in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Scott Eastman, Vicente Sanz Rozalén, Stephen Jacobson. New York City: Berghahn, 2021.
Courses Taught
Graduate
- Digital History (HIST 6322)
- History and Memory (HIST 6321)
- The Practice of Public History (HIST 7372)
- General Research Seminar (HIST 5398)
Undergraduate
- Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity (Honors 3399Q)
- Rebels and Power in Renaissance Spain, 1492 to 1700 (HIST 3332)
- Dictatorships and Democracy in Modern Spain, 1808 to Present (HIST 3333)
- The Myths of Western Civilization (HON 3399F)
- Podcasting European History (HIST 3301)
- History of Western Societies from the Early Modern Era to the Present (HIST 2320)
- Youth Culture and Digital Archives (HIST 3302)