Tourist Convergences in the Cold War: The Case of Franco’s Spain and Socialist Romania
Guest Lecturer Oana Adelina Stefan

This lecture examines how international tourism brought about similar developments in socialist Romania and Franco’s Spain during the 1960s and the 1970s, despite their location on different sides of the Iron Curtain and their antithetical political regimes.
Adelina Stefan is a postdoctoral researcher at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). She is a historian of 20th-century Eastern and Southern Europe with a particular interest in the cultural history of the Cold War, tourism and consumption. Previously, she was a Humanities Initiative Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University in Budapest and a research associate in the Department of History and Civilisation at the European University Institute in Florence. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Pittsburgh, United States. Her book manuscript, tentatively entitled Vacationing in Dictatorships: Foreign Tourists to Socialist Romania and Francoist Spain, 1960s-1970s, examines how international tourism brought about a bottom-up liberalisation in the two dictatorships as it altered ordinary people’s lifestyles and material culture.