Spanish and Portuguese graduate student Robert Myak has been named a recipient of a Hyde Fellowship in the Humanities which provides funding for dissertation research abroad for the summer or full-year.

“With my Hyde Fellowship, I will travel to Madrid, Spain for the academic year where I will consult the national state archives, oral histories, the press, and museum holdings. My goal is to investigate hunger and the black market (estraperlo) in the first twenty-five years of General Francisco Franco's dictatorship (1939-1964) in order to question the regime's narrativization of postwar peace,” said Myak. “On one hand, my archive will consist of both official Francoist documentation and film and literature produced by a diverse gamut of writers with various, complex, and evolving relationships with the regime, like Gonzalo Torrente Ballester and Dionisio Ridruejo. On the other, I will consult 'life histories', following the sociological methodology, to examine individuals whose very lives, as recorded in diverse archives, function as counter-narratives. Through them, I hope to highlight not only the persistence of the oft corrupt black market but also solidarity networks that existed both as a result of and to combat famine, largely wrought by the regime's autarchic policies.”

Hyde Fellowships are awarded to outstanding doctoral students in the departments of Art and Archaeology, Classics, East Asian Studies, English, French and Italian, German, Near Eastern Studies, and Spanish and Portuguese.