Noted Spanish author Antonio Muñoz Molina will deliver the annual Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives/Bill Susman Lecture at New York University’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (located at 53 Washington Square South) on Friday, April 29, at 6:15 p.m. He will speak on the importance of the Spanish Civil War in his own literary and political formation.
The event is named in honor of a recently deceased veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a group of North American volunteers that went to Spain to combat the fascist uprising of General Francisco Franco (1936-39). Bill Susman was also one of the founders of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), the most comprehensive archive in the world documenting the involvement of Americans in the Spanish Civil War. The archive was acquired in 2001 by NYU’s Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives. ALBA is also the name of an organization of Lincoln Brigade veterans, scholars, artists, and activists dedicated to the preservation of the antifascist legacy of the brigade and its archives.
Antonio Muñoz Molina, one of contemporary Spain’s most important novelists, is currently director of Instituto Cervantes New York. He is the author of several novels including Sepharad, a collection of 17 stories about pre-World War II refugees and exiles who subsequently become victims of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, In the Absence of Blanca, Windows on Manhattan, and Carlotta Fainberg.
The event is cosponsored by ALBA the organization, the Tamiment Library, and the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, and is free is free and open to the public; for further information call 212.998.3650 or log on to www.nyu.edu/kjc.