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Born and raised on the Italian West Coast, Alessio Piras is a teacher-scholar and a creative writer. He holds a Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Pisa and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from the University of New Mexico. His research interests include Iberian Cultural Studies of the 20th and 21st centuries, Spanish Republican Civil War Exile, Environmental Humanities, and Urban Cultural Studies.

 His book project, The Borderland City: Race, Immigration, and Environment in the literature and movie about Barcelona, examines Spanish and Catalan cultural responses to migration and urban transformation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Grounded in his interdisciplinary engagement with border studies, urban studies, and environmental humanities, this work informs his teaching by providing students with analytical tools to understand literature and film as interventions in debates about migration, nationalism, and socio-spatial justice.

 Alessio is the author of Il Labirinto Spagnolo (2019), a comparative study of the Spanish Civil War literature that begins with the work of the exiled writer Max Aub. He edited the collection Transformaciones. Escritos sobre política y sociedad en España, 1961-1991 (2018), a collection of Francisco Ayala’s essays on Spain’s transition to democracy. Recently, he collected and edited the letters between Max Aub and the Catalan publisher and poet Carlos Barral in the book Epistolario, 1957-1972. ¿Altera el mundo una pared? (2026).

 Alessio also published several crime fiction novels and short stories in Italian and co-founded the journal Intersecciones Hispánicas, housed at the University of New Mexico. In his free time (?), Alessio loves reading, traveling to the ocean, and watching sports (soccer and athletics).