Saida Palou Rubio holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University
of Barcelona (2011). Her doctoral dissertation, Barcelona, destino
turístico. Promoción pública, turismos, imágenes y ciudad (1888–2010), was
awarded the Agustí Duran i Sanpere History Prize of the City of Barcelona
(Barcelona City Council, 2011). Since 2010 she has been a member of the faculty
at the University of Girona, Department of History and Art History, where she
currently serves as Associate Professor. She was a member of the University’s
Equality and Gender Committee between 2016 and 2020. She has co-supervised one
doctoral dissertation (PhD Programme in Human, Heritage and Cultural Sciences,
UdG) and is currently supervising two additional dissertations (Interuniversity
PhD Programme in Tourism, UdG). She has served on fourteen doctoral committees
in various Spanish universities, in the roles of member, secretary, and
alternate. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Campus of
Excellence in Tourism and Water (e-MTA UdG–UIB, 2013–14) and subsequently
worked as a full-time researcher at the Catalan Institute for Cultural Heritage
Research (ICRPC–CERCA, 2018–24), where she developed individual and
collaborative research in both historical and contemporary fields of cultural
heritage studies.
Her primary research area concerns the political and cultural history of
tourism. She specializes in the study of tourism-promoting institutions,
discourses, and agents, with particular emphasis on the first third of the
twentieth century. She also conducts research on ethnological and intangible
cultural heritage, focusing on its uses, representations, and transmission in
diverse sociocultural contexts. She has been involved in five National R&D
Plan projects, three as a member of the core research team and two as a member
of the working team, on topics related to tourism history and cultural
heritage. In addition, she has participated in seventeen knowledge-transfer
projects, four of them as Principal Investigator, carried out in collaboration
with public institutions (the Government of Catalonia, provincial councils, and
municipal administrations). She coordinated a research team in a European
territorial cooperation Programme (INTERREG SUDOE) aimed at analyzing processes
and strategies for the valorization of local heritage in rural and cross-border
settings. She is also involved in seven scientific cooperation projects in the
Sahrawi refugee camps of Tindouf (Algeria), dedicated to the recovery,
documentation, and dissemination of historical memory and cultural heritage.
Her academic output includes forty-three
peer-reviewed journal articles, thirty-eight book chapters (published by both
national and international SPI publishers), and four books (two edited). She
has also published conference proceedings, exhibition catalogues, and other
scholarly texts, and has coordinated three special issues in academic journals.
Her work analyses, among other topics, the role of gender in the construction
of collective identities through tourism promotion materials in diverse
historical and political contexts (including democratic regimes and
dictatorship). She has examined for several periods of the twentieth century
the institutional agents of tourism promotion and the dominant cultural and
political narratives underpinning tourism—engaging with concepts such as
patriotism, civic-mindedness, and progress. Furthermore, she has contributed to
the study of collective memory regarding leisure mobilities and tourist
landscapes. Most of her publications are listed under her ORCID ID
0000-0003-4145-8133.
To date, she has delivered thirty-eight conference contributions, both
individually and in co-authorship, including one invited keynote lecture at an
international conference. She has coordinated eight academic workshops and has
served on ten scientific and organizing committees, among them the Scientific
Committee of the 2nd Catalan Congress of Anthropology (University of
Girona, 2022) and the Secretariat of the Convegno internazionale di studi Il
turismo tra guerra e pace, 1900–1939 (Sorrento, 2025). She has also
promoted various academic dissemination activities, notably the curatorship of
the international seminar Les cultures del turisme (Centre de Cultura
Contemporània de Barcelona, 2025) and the series Destinació Barcelona.
Història del turisme a la ciutat (Barcelona City Historical Archive, 2014).
She served on the Board of Directors of the Catalan Institute of Anthropology
(2016–23) and is a member of four editorial boards. She has been a visiting
scholar at the Dipartimento delle Culture Europee e del Mediterraneo:
architettura, ambiente, patrimoni culturali (DiCEM) at the Università degli
Studi della Basilicata (Matera, Italy), through the Staff Mobility for Training
Programme (Erasmus+ KA131 STT).