University of Oregon Scholar Conducts an Oral History of Women in the Spanish Civil War Period

Gina Herrmann, associate professor of Spanish at the University or Oregon is conducting an oral history project relating to women activists during the Spanish Civil War. Supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the research will be published in a book entitled Voices of the Vanquished: Spanish Republican Women in War and Prison. Dr. Hermann’s research has been ongoing for the past 20 years.

Dr. Herrmann said that “when I started the project, I was interested in this ideal of these women. I saw them picking up rifles and going to the front lines . . . it was glamorous. I was very quickly disabused of this notion. The oral history I was collecting were stories of imprisonment, torture, the loss of comrades, destroyed families.”

In examining the stories of Spanish women survivors of civil war and political incarceration, Dr. Herrmann hopes to shed light on the circumstances of many women political prisoners and refugees today. The stories have relevance to everyone from the women survivors of 1970s-era Latin American wars to women prisoners of today in the Middle East and Asia.

Dr. Herrmann joined the faculty at University of Oregon in 2002 after teaching at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She is the author of Written in  Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain (University of Illinois Press, 2009).

Dr. Herrmann holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. in Romance studies from Cornell University. She earned a master’s degree at Columbia University.