Max Ferrer, Ph.D., is a historian of identity, soft power, and contemporary global culture. He is currently the Historical Methods Research Fellow and Archivist at the CWAR Institute and the Museum of Music History in association with Wolfson College, Oxford. Dr. Ferrer recently completed his PhD on nationalism and globalization in contemporary Catalonia at King's College London, where he taught modern global history and memory studies. He is currently working on developing his dissertation into a first monograph.
Broadly speaking, Dr. Ferrer writes about the ways in which people, cultures, and ideas cross borders, and how those crossing impact the formation of identity. As part of CWAR's Cold War Lives project, With support from both OCLW and CWAR's "Cold War Lives" initiative, he is in the early stages of developing a book exploring his family's history of migration from Spain to Cuba in the nineteenth century, to the United States in the wake of the Cuban Revolution, and to Europe in the twenty-first century. This project, which puts family papers and oral history interviews in conversation with documents from archives on either side of the Atlantic, will explore the relationship between culture, immigration, and identity in the complex political environment of the long twentieth century.
Publications:
Ferrer, Max "Catalanising the Costa Brava: Local Interests, Global Tourism, and the Nationalist Power of Authenticity in the Late Twentieth Century," Journal of Global History, August 6, 2025, 1-18.
Ferrer, Max, "Cultural Differentiation through Sub-Regional Tourism: A Lesson from Catalonia" in European Integration and Disintegration: Essays from Europe's Next Generation of Thinkers, eds. Nick Cohen and Ayana Dootalieva. Routledge (2022)
