Natalia Núñez-Bargueño

Natalia Núñez Bargueño, PhD, is President of the Asociación Española de Historia Religiosa Contemporánea (AEHRC http://www.aehrc.es/ ) and Director of the Feliciano Montero Seminar of Contemporary Religious History, and currently a Marie Skłodowska‑Curie Fellow (MSCA) at KU Leuven, where she works between the Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies and the Faculty of Arts (MoSa). Her research focuses on mass culture and religion, form the perspective of entangled history and gender, with particular attention to the transnational, political and social dimensions of modern Catholicism.

Holder of a double Ph.D. (Mention très honorable avec félicitations du Jury / Cum Laude) jointly awarded by the Sorbonne and the University of Alcalá de Henares (2018), she devoted her dissertation—“Croyances, espaces et politique dans l’Espagne du XXe siècle : les congrès eucharistiques internationaux”—to the intersections between belief, space, and politics in twentieth‑century Spain. This study received the 2019 Best Dissertation Award in History from the University of Alcalá. Her monograph, "Fe, modernidad y política: los congresos eucarísticos internacionales" (Faith, Modernity and Politics: the International Eucharistic Congresses, Comares, 2024), represents the first book ever dedicated to the history of Eucharistic Congresses. It is the culmination of ten years of research conducted across major international archives, offering an innovative analysis of the global dimensions of modern Catholicism.

Alongside this work, she has authored numerous articles and book chapters in French, Spanish, and English, and co‑edited the volume "Más allá de los nacionalcatolicismos: redes transnacionales de los catolicismos hispánicos" (Beyond National Catholicisms: Transnational Networks of Hispanic Catholicisms, Sílex, 2021).

Her academic trajectory also includes a postdoctoral fellowship at the Facultad de Humanidades of the Universidad de Castilla‑La Mancha, as well as obtaining an invited research fellowship at the History Department of SciencesPo, where she also taught seminars on Asian and European History. More recently. She has also been appointed as a temporary member of the École Française de Rome (2024–2025). Her work is closely connected to several international initiatives, and she currently contributes as an associated research fellow to five different research projects based in Spain and France.

Within the framework of her MSCA fellowship, she is developing a major research project examining the role of women, religion, and international organisations in the shaping of twentieth‑century global governance and transnational Catholic networks: https://theofem-project.com/