New Cabell Hall 458

This semester Spring 2025 I am not holding regular in-person office hours. However, I remain accessible and welcome conversations. Please feel free to reach out via email if you’d like to discuss academic matters, potential collaborations, or schedule a meeting. I am available for online conversations.

Biography

Robert Sanchis-Álvarez is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese at the University of Virginia, where he also studies urban history and design through the School of Architecture. Originally from Barcelona, his academic path bridges Hispanic and Southeast Asian studies from the nineteenth century, and his work moves between archives, literature, and the everyday built environment.

Robert’s dissertation, Beyond Empire’s Reach: Catalan and Filipino Narratives in the Shaping of Everyday Life in Colonial Philippines, examines how Spanish colonialism shaped everyday spatial practices in the Philippines, focusing on structures that regulated labor, from domestic haciendas and servant corridors to early industrial sites. His research draws on archival documents, literature, architectural plans, and legal records to analyze how the built environment and its representations articulated colonial hierarchies in lived space, while also registering moments of resistance. The project also traces the entangled relationship between the Philippines and Catalonia, exploring how these spaces and narratives reflect shared imperial formations and their material afterlives in both regions.

Alongside his academic work, Robert is involved in a partnership with the Center for West Visayan Studies at the University of the Philippines Visayas, centered on the repatriation of El Látigo Nacional, a unique artifact: a newspaper founded in 1893 in Barcelona by the Ilonggo propagandist Graciano López Jaena. The project returns the newspaper to Iloilo through archival recovery and both institutional and community dialogue. He is also developing a collaboration with the Museu Víctor Balaguer in Catalonia, which holds a colonial-era archive and collection of Catalan and Philippine art and material culture, focused on the interpretation and curatorial engagement with these materials and spaces.

His broader work intervenes in debates on colonial spaces and the forms through which memory persists or is reclaimed. He is particularly interested in how archives and museums can be reimagined as spaces of mobility, both physical and digital. His research has been supported by the Dumas Malone Fellowship, the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, and the East Asia Center at the University of Virginia, and has been presented at institutions in the Philippines, Spain, and the United States.