Thursday, March 27, 2025, from 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm at the Observatorio Cervantes at Harvard (2 Arrow St, 4th Floor, Cambridge, MA)
This event will be held in person and conducted in English. Click here to RSVP.
The opinion section of El País has long been considered the most important generator of opinion in post-Franco Spain. Since the paper’s founding in 1976, the section has staged debates over everything from the country’s transition to democracy and its entry into NATO to historical memory and how to understand the depopulation of rural Spain. Its role has been so fundamental that some observers have suggested that politicians turned to the opinion section for their policy ideas. Less well known, however, is the fundamental role played by The New York Times in the conception and development of the El País opinion section. This presentation tells the story of how Juan Luis Cebrián, the paper’s founding editor in chief, and other editors turned to the Times as a model for marrying political pugilism, public interest, and profitability in Spain’s newly democratic public sphere.
Bécquer Seguín is Assistant Professor of Iberian Studies at Johns Hopkins University and the author of The Op-Ed Novel: A Literary History of Post-Franco Spain (2024). His research focuses on the literary and intellectual history of modern Spain and has appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry and Hispanic Review. With Sebastiaan Faber, he has covered Spanish politics and culture for The Nation since 2015, and he regularly writes for media in the US and Spain, including El País, CTXT, Slate, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books, where he co-edits the Literature in Translation and Sports sections.