José María Cardesín Díaz

Category: Professor and historian
Birth Date: 1961
Birth Place: Santiago de Compostela (A Coruña)
 Curriculum

He got a Ph.D in History (1990) at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has been a “Profesor Titular” of the History of Social Movements in the Department of Sociology at the University of A Coruña since 1994. There he teaches Contemporary History and History of Political Thought, and does coordinate the Group of Territorial Studies. He was a visitant professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and was a visitant researcher at ISCTE (University of Lisbon), the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris) and the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales (UNAM, Mexico DF). He has given lectures in universities of Portugal, France, Italy, Greece, United Kingdom, Sweden, Mexico and United States. He was awarded in 2012 by the Spanish agency ANEP the condition of ‘acreditado’ for a university chair.

 Work & Activities

He has published some 75 works in the fields of history and social sciences, in such journals as Annales, Histoire Urbaine (France), Urban History (UK), Storia Urbana (Italy), Ler Historia (Portugal), Prohistoria (Argentine), Agricultura y Sociedad, Historia Contemporánea and Historia Social. In the 1990s his research was focused on the agrarian history of Galicia: see his book ‘Tierra, trabajo y reproducción social en una aldea gallega, S.XVIII-XX’ –Land, Labour and Social Reproduction in a Galician Village- (1992). Nowadays his research interests lie primarily in the field of comparative urban history (in the study of the relationships between urban planning, social movements and `lieux de mémoire’). Among his most recent work see: ‘City, Housing and Welfare in Spain, from the Civil War to Present Times’, and ‘Reconstruyendo la Ciudad Norteamericana a través del Cine: el Downtown de Los Angeles’ –Rebuilding the American City through Cinema. Los Angeles Downtown-. He has been Director of six research projects (Xunta de Galicia) and several Agreements of Technical Assistance, and he has been a member of another ten European, Spanish or Galician research projects. He was early interested in the use of new technologies in history. His two last research projects (‘Patrimonio de Futuro’ and ‘Historia Urbana de Galicia’) implied the building of two websites: ‘Ferrol Urban History’ (in English and Spanish) that was published in Cambridge Journals Online in 2005; and ‘Historia Urbana de Galicia’ (in Galician, Spanish and English), coming soon.

 Other Interesting Aspects

Nowadays he is vice dean at the Faculty of Sociology. He was a member of the advisory board of such journals as Prohistoria, Techniques et Cultures, Arquivos da Memoria, Historia Social or Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos. He was awarded the ‘PhD Prize´ in History in 1992, the Xunta de Galicia’s Prize in Social Sciences in 1993, and the H.J. Dyos Prize in Urban History in 2005 (by the Centre for Urban History, UK). He is, happily, married and is the father of three daughters.