1959–
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.
Activities and affiliations
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
Related historical events
Researching Francoist repression and the prison system
Having concentrated through the 2000s on the wartime Republic and cultural history, Graham shifted the weight of her research after the early 2010s toward the repressive machinery of the Franco regime, above all its prison and camp system. The War and its Shadow (2012) placed the Spanish Civil War as a precursor to Europe's wars of ethnic and political "cleansing" and traced the international reverberations of the Republican defeat. In 2016 she edited Interrogating Francoism, which re-examined twentieth-century Spain through the dictatorship and its legacy. Awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship in 2017 to study Franco's prisons between 1936 and 1976, she held it from October 2018 to October 2021, developing an approach that treats the prison system as a central axis for analysing Franco's long dictatorship. One outcome was the 2024 European History Quarterly special issue "The prison worlds of Francoism 1939-1978," which she edited and to which she contributed, with C. Lorenzo Rubio, the article "Not recognizing the political: analysing Franco's long dictatorship through a genealogy of its prisoners."