Performing the nation

Performing the Nation: Nationalism according to Hamilton was my International Relations thesis at Blanquerna. Using a constructivist and performative framework — Anderson, Billig, Bhabha, Nye — it analyses how the musical stages American nationalism across its two acts: the founding myth, the self-made man, the tension between civic and cultural nationalism, and the casting paradox of a diverse cast performing a story that erases slavery. It's a serious academic study, built on a close reading of all forty-six songs.

I researched and wrote the thesis, and defended it before the tribunal. But I have an audience across three worlds — musical theatre, communications, and International Relations — and many were curious about the topic without wanting to read the full text. So I built a companion campaign: a week-long Instagram countdown to my defense, designed and written entirely by me, that turned each of the thesis's findings into a shareable Story.

The challenge was translation — making an academic argument travel without flattening it. Not "my theoretical framework", but "did you know Hamilton hides two different nationalisms, one in each act?" And because my followers came from three different worlds, each day had to work on several levels at once: a fun fact for the theatre fans, a real argument for my IR peers, a piece of content craft for the communication students. Same research, three ways in.

This is the skill I most want to keep building: taking something complex and specialised and making it matter to people who'd never have picked it up. Bridging the academic and the popular — rigour intact, barrier removed — is at the heart of good communication. And it's where my two degrees finally met: the analytical training of International Relations, and the instinct to make an idea land with an audience.