The British historian who named the Spanish Civil War 'the war before the lights went out'
The Spanish Civil War was, in a sense, the war before the lights went out, the war that could have changed the course of European and world history if power actors had behaved in different ways.
Born in Liverpool and holding a DPhil from Oxford, she is Professor Emeritus of Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her 2002 study The Spanish Republic at War became a standard work, and her 2005 The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction sold over 50,000 copies and was translated into five languages. Through the frame of a democratic Republic abandoned by the Western powers' Non-Intervention policy, her work recasts the Spanish Civil War as both the first international battlefield against European fascism and the last anti-fascist war before Cold War orthodoxies set in.
Career Timeline
- 1980s–1990sTaught and researched at the University of Southampton
- 1995Co-edited Spanish Cultural Studies with Jo Labanyi (Oxford University Press)
- 2002Published The Spanish Republic at War (Cambridge University Press)
- 2005–Professor, later Emeritus, at Royal Holloway, University of London
- 2010King Juan Carlos I of Spain Chair at New York University
- 2018–2021Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for Franco's prisons