Juan Francisco Fuentes-Director of AE

CURRICULUM VITAE:

Director of the Group of Advanced Research From Empire to Nation, RCC at Harvard University (2010). Full Professor of Modern History at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in 2006 (Center for European Studies) and 2008 (Department of History) and fellow of Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard University in 2006 and 2008. He is the author of thirteen books, among them Largo Caballero: El Lenin español, Diccionario politico y social del siglo XIX español and Diccionario político y social del siglo XX español, both directed with J. Fernández Sebastián. Curator of the exhibition La nación en armas. España, 1808–1814 (Sociedad Estatales de Conmemoraciones Culturales and Ministry of Defence). His main fields of research are conceptual history, political biographies and Spanish liberalism.

 RESEARCH:

“Making Modern Nations: Myth and Concept of Civil War in Spain (1898-1939)”

“Civil war is a gift of heaven”: Some Spanish politicians and intellectuals, such as Miguel de Unamuno (perhaps the main prophet of the civil war in modern Spain), believed in the moral and historical properties of civil war, making possible a historical change that, in other circumstances, would be inconceivable. This project is aimed to discover and analyse the discourse, in modern Spanish political thought, on the civil war like a shortcut towards nation and revolution, and, at the same time, the parallelism with other foreign similar experiences about war as a key factor in the making of the modern nations. The project will be focused in the search of evidences of a discourse on civil war like a “gift of heaven”, meaning by that an extraordinary device to reach an, otherwise, unachievable aim related with modernity.