Sebastiaan Faber, professor and chair of Hispanic studies, Oberlin College.

Abstract: For the first couple of decades following Spain's transition to democracy, academic historians held something of a monopoly on the legitimate, objective representation of the country's twentieth-century past. In the last ten years, their hegemony has been eroded by a remarkable wave of non-academic, politicized, and at times emphatically subjective studies, documentaries, debates, reportage, novels, and fiction films about the Republic, the Civil War, and Francoism–a wave that in itself indicates a shift in the public's needs and sensibilities when it comes to learning about the past and thinking about its connection to the present. How have Spanish historians dealt with these developments? To what extent are non-academic accounts of the past legitimate, useful, or even indispensable as Spain comes to terms with the Civil War and Francoism? And what specific role can literary fiction play in this process? Sebastiaan Faber is the author and editor of four books, including 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), as well as some fifty articles on Spanish and Latin American cultural history. His areas of interest include the Spanish Civil War, political exile, historical memory, the institutional history of Hispanism, contemporary Spanish fiction and film, and the theory of ideology. Born and raised in the Netherlands, he holds degrees from the University of Amsterdam and U.C. Davis. He has been teaching at Oberlin College since 1999.