Displaced Bodies, Remembered Homes: Exile in 20th-Century Spanish Literature

What does home mean to you?

This interactive workshop invites participants to reflect on the meanings of home and the ideas and feelings we associate with it before exploring what happens when home is lost, left behind, or made impossible to return to. We will engage with short excerpts from 20th-century Spanish women’s writing through guided discussion and small-group activities. Drawing on her dissertation research, María Medín Doce will introduce key concepts around displacement, exile, and identity before examining how three Spanish women writers represent the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship. Working with selected passages, participants will reflect on questions of memory, belonging, and identity while considering how each protagonist experiences displacement differently: from exile as fragmented memory and imagined return, to the construction of hybrid identities across borders, to the experience of those left behind, shaped by absence and gender.

Doce (Galicia, Spain) is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish in the Romance Languages and Literature Department at Colgate University. She completed her PhD at Stony Brook University.

Our Brown Bag series repeats every Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. These talks are catered, free, and open to all.