Emily Stolzenbach MA
PhD Candidate
E-mail: [email protected]
University Profile URL: https://www.uu.nl/medewerkers/EStolzenbach
Cohort/Start PhD: 2025-2026
Utrecht University, Humanities
Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON)
Supervisors: Prof. Eugenia Helena Houvenaghel (Universiteit Utrecht), Dr. María Teresa Navarrete Navarrete (Uppsala Universitet)
Bridging the Divide: The Border Zone as a Transformative Space: Innovative Methodology, Pioneering Spanish Case Study, and Classroom Applications for Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language
During Spain’s right-wing dictatorship (1939-1975), a division emerged between ‘exiled’ writers who fled and ‘insiled’ writers who stayed under the oppressive regime. This project explores the transformative space where these intellectuals connected. The official narrative of national literary history forgets to mention the transnational influence of Rosa Chacel, a writer who was, in her younger years, a member of the intellectual project of the 1920s and 1930s that sought to bring Spain out of its conservatism and turn it into a progressive and internationalist country. Thanks to Chacel, these young ‘insiled’ writers had access to international literary and cultural references forbidden by the dictatorship, which led them to create works where a new Spain appeared, which, as it happened at the beginning of the century, sought to be part of the international context. This oversight reveals a gap in the official account that this project aims to address.
The literary works created within this connection offer rich materials for the teaching of language and cultural awareness in the ELE classroom, addressing a gap in resources for the new Modern Foreign Languages curriculum in the Netherlands. This innovative approach and pioneering case study, focusing on the border zone of exile and oppression, is adaptable to other contexts shaped by authoritarian regimes.