Adi Tufek was born in 1997 in Pula, Croatia. In 2022, he earned a master’s degree in Hispanic literatures and Linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. During his BA and MA studies, he spent one academic year at the University of Salamanca and did an internship at the Faculty of Philology at the University of Seville. Prior to joining REVENANT, he worked as a translator and foreign language teacher. His fields of interest include contemporary Latin American literature, reception theory, sociology of literature, narratology, cultural memory studies, ecocriticism and sociolinguistics. Adi is currently a PhD candidate in Hispanic American Literature at Complutense University in Madrid.
In the framework of the REVENANT project, his research will focus on contemporary representations of Maximilian I, Archduke of Austria, and his wife Charlotte of Belgium (or, as she is known in the Hispanic world, Carlota de Bélgica), who ruled Mexico during the ephemeral Second Mexican Empire (1864-1867). Their intriguing biographies, the very nature of the Second Mexican Empire, as well as later sociopolitical changes that took place in Mexico, have led to numerous myths that surround Maximilian and Charlotte and secured them an ambivalent position in collective memory. Studying different ways of transforming these two historical figures into fictional characters in contemporary Mexican literature, film and popular culture, the research will try to shed some light on the dynamics between art, collective memory and identity. More concretely, the project will consist of analysis of cultural artifacts such as historical novels, short stories, plays, movies and telenovelas, as well as conditions of their production and their posterior reception, in order to understand the construction and subversion of narratives that form cultural memory.