Spanish Civil War expert screens historic documentary

Anthony L. Geist, a professor of Spanish and comparative literature and a scholar of the Spanish Civil War, will be on campus December 8 to present his acclaimed documentary on the Americans in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who defied their government to fight fascism in Spain in the late 1930s. The film will be shown at 7:30 p.m. in the Beulah Kahler theater at the KAC, followed by a question-and-answer session and reception.

Almas sin fronteras (Souls Without Borders) tells the story of the 2,800 American volunteers who defied a U.S. ban against intervention and took up arms against fascism in defense of the democratic Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939. The film includes rare footage of the war and the seventy-year history of the Lincoln Brigade, held for years unedited in archives around the world, as well as intimate interviews with some of the fifty survivors still living today.

Professor Geist is chair of Spanish and Portuguese and professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington, Seattle. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978, and taught at Princeton University, the University of Texas at San Antonio, and Dartmouth College before joining the University of Washington in 1987. Along with publications focused largely on issues of modernism and postmodernism in twentieth-century Spanish poetry, Professor Geist's main field of research concerns the art and literature of the Spanish Civil War, including a traveling exhibit he assembled and supervised of children's drawings from the war that were later published in an accompanying book, They Still Draw Pictures: Children's Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (2002).

Almas sin fronteras has previously been broadcast on Spanish Public Television and has been shown at numerous film festivals including Seattle and San Francisco in the United States, and internationally in China, Mexico, Russia, and Spain, among other countries.

Professor Geist's visit is sponsored by the departments of Modern Languages and Literatures and History, the American Studies program, and the provost's office.