Thursday, May 1, 2025, from 5:00 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This event will be held in person and conducted in Spanish. Click here to RSVP.
When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, a New York-based institution, The New School for Social Research, established a few years earlier to promote the development of the social sciences, actively sought to attract scientists exiled from Germany and from the countries subsequently occupied by the Nazi regime. Known from that point on as the University in Exile, it became a vital meeting place for European refugees who worked, wrote, and reflected on the situation unfolding in Europe, and who, in some cases, contributed to the formulation of economic and political plans for the U.S. administration.
During the same period, Spain was engulfed in a civil war that ultimately resulted in a long-lasting military dictatorship. Among those who fled the country was a significant group of scientists and intellectuals who sought refuge in countries such as France, Mexico, Argentina, and, notably, the United States. The New School for Social Research issued invitations to several Spanish academics; among them, Fernando de los Ríos and Alfredo Mendizábal held positions there for a time. This presentation will examine the presence of both professors at The New School, exploring why they attracted the institution’s interest, the roles they assumed within it, and how, through their work, Spain and the Spanish language remained present in what, for them as well, became a University in Exile.
Carolina Rodríguez-López is an Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her areas of specialization include the history of universities, the history of exile, and urban history. She is currently a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard, where she co-chairs the Spanish Exile RCCHU Study Group alongside Daniel Aguirre Oteiza. Her current stay, as well as previous ones, is contributing to the preparation of her forthcoming monograph, which offers an intellectual and emotional history of Spanish academic exile on the American East Coast.
In the field of exile studies, she has published several notable works, including "`Tú labora por la justicia´: Guerra, exilio y emociones en la familia Gómez Ibáñez", in Hispania (2024); "El franquismo como régimen emocional: la experiencia de los exiliados españoles", in Investigaciones históricas. Época moderna y contemporánea (2023); and the chapter "El exilio español en las universidades estadounidenses: cartografía humana y emocional", in Miradas encontradas. Sociedades y ciudadanías en España y Estados Unidos (2019), edited by M. Huguet and E. Cerdá. She also co-authored, with Daniel Ventura Herranz, the article "De emociones y exilios" in Cuadernos de historia contemporánea (2014), and co-edited, with José M. Faraldo, the volume Reconsidering a Lost Intellectual Project: Exiles' Reflections on Cultural Differences, published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2012.
She is the Principal Investigator of the research project A Global Campus: Universities, Cultural Transfers, and Experiences in the 20th Century (2021–2025), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, from which a monograph bearing the same title will be published by Routledge. Additionally, she served as Director of the Interpretation Center of the Ciudad Universitaria of Madrid (2018–2019), was Editor-in-Chief of CIAN-Revista de historia de las universidades (2014–2024), and currently coordinates the Interuniversity Master’s Program in Contemporary History at the Complutense University of Madrid.