Faculty Profiles

Research Interests
Europe; Spain; fascism; antiauthoritarianism; youth culture; historical memory and myth; digital history and social media; music, film, and visual culture; popular culture and celebrity; urban spaces and the environment

Biography
Dr. Louie Dean Valencia is the Director of the Public History Program and the Texas Center for Public History (TCPH) at Texas State University. Dr. Valencia earned a Ph.D. in Early and Late Modern European History from Fordham University in New York City and studies countercultures, myth-making, and how young people create social change through counternarratives, technology, art, culture, print and social media, celebrity, and public spaces. Before joining Texas State, Dr. Valencia was a Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York. He serves as the Honors LLC Faculty-in-Residence.

As a teenager, Dr. Valencia ran off in search of Caravaggio paintings, backpacking around Europe, encountering strangers, and attending festivals with Hare Krishnas; he was never quite the same. He began developing and selling musician websites in middle school—selling his first website in high school. He has worked as a digital strategy analyst and consultant on major digital projects and campaigns, including PepsiCo, Patrón, LOFT, and GOOP.

His books include Far-Right Revisionism and the End of History (2020) and Antiauthoritarian Youth Culture in Francoist Spain (2018). He is a member of the Emotions in European Politics network and serves on the editorial boards of Popular Culture Review, Modern History of Politics and Violence, and Revista Internacional de Estudios sobre Terrorismo. Currently, Dr. Valencia is finishing his forthcoming book, “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity” and is working on a six-volume series on the deep history of countercultures from antiquity to the present, to be published as part of Bloomsbury’s Cultural Histories series.

Dr. Valencia directs “Night of Ideas” at Texas State—co-organized with the Embassy of France. The programming brings together community leaders, innovators, artists, students, and scholars for a night of ideas, music, art, film, dialogue, and workshops focused on topics related to storytelling, technology, media, artificial intelligence, the environment, and youth culture. Dr. Valencia teaches his internationally recognized course, “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity: Identity, Internet, and European Pop Culture,” at Lincoln College at the University of Oxford.

Dr. Valencia has received fellowships and grants from the United States Library of Congress, the Spanish Ministry of Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Santander Bank, amongst others.

As an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, he was a museum educator, curated exhibitions such as Carl Van Vechten: Photographing the Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, contributed to the permanent exhibition, New York at Its Core, organized pop-up exhibitions, and was one of the two primary organizers of History Day for the entirety of New York City.

He is a fan of Superman comic books, kebabs, Shawn Mendes, Stranger Things, Arthur Rimbaud, coffee shops, New Wave music, photography, cinema, side quests, and traveling.