New PhD dissertation about the censorship of John Steinbeck during the Franco dictatorship defended at the Instituto Franklin-UAH
On May 31st, 2024, Stewart Strider Merrit defended his PhD dissertation “The Censorship of John Steinbeck During the Franco Dictatorship in Spain,” supervised by Dr. José Santiago Fernández Vázquez, Associate Professor at the Universidad de Alcalá (UAH). This research falls within the PhD Program of Interdisciplinary North American Studies of the Instituto Franklin-UAH.
The examining board was presided over by Dr. José Manuel Estévez-Saá, Associate Professor at the Universidade da Coruña, with Dr. Sergio Antoranz López, Assistant Professor at the Universidad de Alcalá, as secretary, and Dr. María del Mar Ramón Torrijos, Associate Professor at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, as a board member. The dissertation was unanimously graded as outstanding (sobresaliente) (if it’s deserving of the cum laude title, it will be notified later on, according to the new regulations).
This research analyzes the censorship of John Steinbeck in Spain during the Franco dictatorship (1936-1975). It attempts to determine to what extent, why, and in which cases the works of this important American author were censored under a fascist and nationalistic system. Strider argues that the censorship evolved under the three stages of the Franco dictatorship, that the process and the result of the censorship were inconsistent, proposing a hypothesis for that discrepancy. The historical background of Franco dictatorship, the censorship theory, and the literary analysis of Steinbeck’s books are essential to get a critical understanding of the formulated questions. Likewise, a key part of the research is the analysis of official government censorship reports stored at the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA) of Alcalá de Henares. The main objective of this research is to clarify the censorship process under the Franco dictatorship, its evolution throughout the dictatorship, and to emphasize the censorship of John Steinbeck in Spain.
Stewart Strider Merritt is a PhD student at the the Department of American Studies of the Universidad de Alcalá. His research focuses on the censorship of American literature in Spain during the Franco dictatorship. He has a Master’s degree on Bilingual Education and American Studies from the Universidad de Alcalá and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). He teaches Cultural Studies and Rhetoric at the Universidad de Alcalá and at the Saint Louis University in Madrid.