FSEM 100 R8 | The Ghosts and Monsters of Spain’s “Forgotten” Past

Black and white photo of a ghostly old structure.

Unlike post-Nazi Germany, post-dictatorial Spain has never been officially compelled to confront the violence, repression, and human rights abuses of its twentieth-century past. As a result, the victims of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) and the Franco dictatorship (1939–1975) were largely silenced, while perpetrators were never held legally accountable. These unresolved histories continue to haunt contemporary Spain, leaving behind what many scholars describe as the “ghosts” of a repressed past.

In this seminar, we will explore how Spanish writers, filmmakers, and artists since the early 2000s have sought to recover these silenced voices and confront the lingering effects of historical trauma. Drawing on the work of historians, cultural critics, and theorists such as Jo Labanyi, we will examine how ghostly figures, monsters, and other unsettling presences in literature and film give shape to collective memory, loss, and unresolved injustice. These spectral figures, far from being merely fantastical, reveal the enduring consequences of silence and forgetting in a society shaped by dictatorship.

To ground our analysis, we will study key moments in Spanish history—including the Spanish Inquisition, the Civil War, the Franco regime, and the Democratic Transition of 1975-1978—paying particular attention to the pacto de olvido (Pact of Silence), a political agreement that postponed public reckoning with the past after Franco’s death in 1975. We will also consider contemporary debates surrounding the excavation of mass graves and the creation of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, both of which expose the continued marginalization of the regime’s victims.

Through close readings of literary texts, films, and visual culture produced from the 1970s to the present, students will investigate how memory, truth, and repression are represented—and contested—in modern Spain. Ultimately, this course asks how the ghosts of the past continue to shape Spanish identity today and what it means to confront, rather than silence, a difficult and unfinished history.

Photo of Antonia Delgado-Poust, Associate Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures

Antonia Delgado-Poust, Associate Professor of Modern Languages & Literatures

I was fortunate to be raised in a bilingual, bicultural home and to spend most summers of my childhood in Spain with my parents and sister. I continue to visit Spain regularly—ideally once a year—to spend time with friends and family, while also conducting research and sharing my work with colleagues from around the world. Growing up, I often heard family stories about the Spanish Civil War and the many abuses of power carried out during the Franco dictatorship. At the time, these anecdotes felt like fragments of a distant past. It was not until graduate school, however, when I took a course dedicated to the painful legacy and long-lasting repercussions of the Civil War and the Franco regime, that I began to understand how deeply those historical events shaped not only Spanish culture, but individual lives as well—both real and fictional. That course helped me recognize how my own family’s experiences were intertwined with the silences, injustices, and unresolved trauma of these turbulent periods in recent Spanish history. Inspired by the literary and cinematic works I encountered in that class, as well as by my longstanding fascination with the Civil War, my research now focuses on representations of memory, “truth,” and the past in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Spanish literature, film, and culture. Much of my scholarship—and, at times, my teaching—centers on women’s experiences in contemporary Spain and on recent efforts in Spanish cultural production to recover the voices of those who were repressed or forgotten: the silenced “ghosts” of Spain’s past. I am currently working on a book project that brings feminist theory into dialogue with memory studies to examine how the silencing or dismissal of women’s voices and memories during the thirty-six years of the Franco dictatorship, and beyond, contributes to a palpable sense of existential insecurity in contemporary novels by women writers.