Robert Sanchis-Álvarez

New Cabell Hall 458

Office Hours: Mondays, 4–6 p.m., and by appointment. Meetings may also be held online.

Biography

Robert Sanchis-Álvarez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia, where he has pursued additional training in urban history and design through the School of Architecture. He studies how empire took shape in the everyday spaces of the nineteenth-century Philippines and through the archives that rendered those spaces legible.

His dissertation, Beyond Empire’s Reach: Microgeographies of Empire in the Colonial Philippines, examines stairs, service passages, thresholds, and administrative spaces as technologies through which colonial power regulated labor and movement. Working with architectural plans, servant registries, legal disputes, and literature from Spain and the Philippines, the project considers the archive itself as a spatial institution whose categories shaped the realities it claimed to document.

His related archival work traces the movement and afterlives of print between Catalonia and the Philippines. Printed Catalonia in Manila reconstructs the networks that connected Barcelona and Manila between 1885 and 1930. In 2025, he coordinated the archival return of El Látigo Nacional, a newspaper edited by the Filipino reformist and writer Graciano López Jaena in Barcelona in 1893, in partnership with the Center for West Visayan Studies at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where the surviving copy is now held.

His research has been supported by the Dumas Malone Graduate Research Fellowship, the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, and the East Asia Center at the University of Virginia.