 |
| Dr Michael Thompson |
The Faculty of Education and Society Research Institute is holding its next School of Culture Research Seminar on Wednesday 1st May 4-5pm at St. Peter’s Campus in David Goldman Room 312A.
All staff and students are welcome as Dr Michael Thompson from Durham University presents his research on theatre censorship in Spain. Work on censorship in modern Spain (both his own and that of other scholars) focuses primarily on the period of the Franco dictatorship (1939-75). This is a rich field and in some ways a very accessible one: Franco’s censorship apparatus was methodical and centralized, and almost all the information needed for an in-depth investigation is contained in the Spanish state archive in Alcalá de Henares. The administrative documents and thousands of censors’ reports provide concrete evidence of what was censored, by whom, and according to what criteria. However, Dr Michael Thompson’s research has sought to compare this model of censorship with those in operation before the establishment of the dictatorship. Theatre censorship during the Second Republic (1931-36) was decentralized and much less reliant on prior vetting of texts, and became radically fragmented by the social, political and economic upheaval triggered in the Republican zone by the civil war (1936-39). Evidence of the operation of censorship in these periods is therefore scarcer, and particularly elusive with reference to the confused war years. Dr Michael Thompson’s talk will present examples of the different kinds of evidence available from the three periods and reflect on what they show about different models of cultural control.
