After graduating from journalism, Bàrbara pursued a master’s degree in World History at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona) and the Freie Universität (Berlin), where she developed a strong interest in transnational extreme-right mobilization. She further developed her education at the Summer School in Comparative and Transnational History Theories and Methodology at the European University Institute (Florence). Before beginning her PhD in History at York University (Toronto), she worked as a journalist for the European Observatory of Memories (EUROM), with which she studied European processes of identity formation, exclusion, and the creation of collective memory.

Bàrbara has contributed to studies in neo-Francoism, and also lectured on the Spanish Civil War; interwar transnational anti-Communism; postwar European radical-right cooperation; and the rise of the extreme right in Canada. She is currently involved in the establishment of the first Spanish Civil War Virtual Museum, and in the creation of the first online database of European museums addressing historical violence and persecution. She has published two book chapters on radicalism; co-edited Radical Right-Wing Responses to COVID-19 (Ibidem-Verlag, 2020); and is at present co-editing The Right and the Radical Right in the Americas with Tamir Bar-On. Bàrbara has actively participated in discussions on international radicalism and racism in the World Association of International Studies (Stanford University), and written on nationalism and racism in Active History, the Globe and Mail, Rantt Media and Fair Observer. At York University, Bàrbara holds the Ontario Trillium Scholarship and currently works on far-right understandings of multiculturalism among 'invisible' minorities (1930s-1970s).

Specialist research areas:

Far-right thought (1930s-today); Christian Nationalism; Europe (esp. Spain); Nord America (esp. Canada); politics and religion; nation-building.