Sebastiaan Faber (Oberlin College)

Tuesday 9 February 2016, 6.00pm, Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1H 0PD

Images were central to the story of the Spanish Civil War and continue to be central in its memory today. After all, the war in Spain was the first major armed conflict to be covered by the modern visual media, equipped with newly portable photo and film cameras. Telling this visual story was not a mere matter of shooting films and photographs, however; it was also one of cutting and pasting. The photomontage, whose use had spread rapidly since the 1920s, became a crucial tool not just for propaganda posters but in journalism as well. And yet the centrality of montage as a tool for truth-telling has not been sufficiently acknowledged. A treasure hunt through the visual archive of the Spanish Civil War yields some surprising finds that place long-standing debates about the historical memory of the conflict in a new light.

Sebastiaan Faber is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College and visiting researcher at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. He has published widely on Spanish and Latin American literature and culture. He is the author of Exile and Cultural Hegemony: Spanish Intellectuals in Mexico, 1939-1975 (Vanderbilt, 2002) and Anglo-American Hispanists and the Spanish Civil War: Hispanophilia, Commitment, and Discipline (Palgrave, 2008), and has co-edited Contra el olvido. El exilio expañol en Estados Unidos (U de Alcalá, 2009). From 2010 till 2015 he served as the Chair of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), whose quarterly journal The Volunteer he co-edits.

Please click here to download a copy of the poster.