Irene Masdeu Torruella

Irene Masdeu is a Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (Taiwan). She develops her research at Interasia research group and Center for East Asian Studies (CERAO) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

She is PhD on Translation and Intercultural Studies at UAB. Her thesis was on mobility, return and transnational links in the context of the Chinese migration to Spain. She has a degree on Social Antropology at UAB and one on Art History at Universitat de Girona. Between 2011 and 2014 she did a research stay at Xiamen University (Fujian) where she did an extensive ethnographical fieldwork in Qingtian (Zhejiang), the main are of origin of the Chinese migration to Spain. She has also conducted fieldwork towards Chinese citizens in five border crossing points in the EU for her project “eu-Lisa Project on Smart Borders” of the European Union Agency For Fundamental Rights (FRA).

At the same time, she is conducting a research on contemporary artistic production in the context of the links between China and Spain. In addition to her task as a researcher, she has also worked on the production, translation, argumentation and anthropological assessment for the documentary filmed in China “La substància” by Lluís Galter (Lastor Media) and she has produced an ethnographic documentary “Trànsits”, which illustrates some of the outcome of her PhD research. Her first ethnographic fieldwork in China about contemporary dongba art (Lijiang, Yunnan) has been published in ICA’s magazine Quaderns d’antropologia del and her research about migrations between China and Spain has led to the publishing of the chapter “Transnational Ritual Practices among Chinese Migrants in Spain” as part of the book After Migration and Religious Affiliation. Religions, Chinese identities and Transnational Networks (World Scientific), as well as the collaboration in the monographic Campos Imprevistos: Etnografías de Asia Oriental en el contexto académico español (Quaderns d’antropologia, ICA).