My first monograph, forthcoming with Legenda, examines cross-cultural depictions of civil war in the theatre of Spain and the former Yugoslavia. Drawing on the ‘travelling turn’ in Memory Studies, I propose that there is a connection between on-stage depictions of travel and off-stage memory politics.

Between 1936 and 1939, over 1,900 Yugoslavs travelled to Spain to fight in the Civil War. The volunteers became national symbols of the fight against fascism in the Balkans and are today referred to as transnational heroes: ‘Naši Španci’ [our Spaniards]. During the war in Yugoslavia, and in the two decades following the country’s dissolution, engagement with the Spanish Civil War came to occupy a prominent role in the region’s artistic output. Representation of the ideological divide in Spain of the 1930s provided an avenue for Yugoslav artists to critically examine the history of internal strife in the Balkans, while avoiding overt mention of local politics. Conversely, Spanish news-coverage of the dissolution of Yugoslavia (and, in particular, the Siege of Sarajevo) brought up long-standing questions regarding yet-unaddressed traumas of the Spanish Civil War, e.g. with respect to exhumation, memory politics, and (more recently) secession.

Examining works in Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, and Slovenian, the book charts thirty years of cultural and mnemonic exchange between the regions, situating these theatrical productions within a long, though under-appreciated — and occasionally clandestine — history of collaboration.