Profile

Robert A. Myak is a PhD candidate (ABD) in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at Princeton University and is writing a dissertation tentatively titled The Francoist Peace: XXV Years of Hunger, the Black Market, and Survival. Spain 1939-1964. He was the 2021 recipient of a Hyde Family Foundation Fellowship that has allowed him to conduct yearlong dissertation research in Madrid, Spain. Furthermore, he is a visiting research scholar at the University of Granada (2021-) and collaborates with the Otra Edad de Plata research group at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has presented his research at conferences at the Universidad de Granada, Texas Tech University, and Princeton University. In addition to his dissertation, he is currently writing a book chapter for the collaborative volume Ópticas femininas do terrorismo de Estado: actitudes sociais, violencias sexuadas e xestión de pasados traumáticos, edited by Aldara Cidrás, and an article on Rafael Chirbes’s postwar novellas. Prior to beginning his dissertation research, he received Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) research grants to conduct pre-dissertation research in Alcalá de Henares and Madrid, Spain, in the Summer of 2019 and received a McMahon travel grant to conduct archival research at the Filmoteca Nacional de España on Carlos Saura’s La prima Angélica. During the COVID-19 crisis, he served as a research assistant for a COVID misinformation project led by the Empirical Studies of Conflict research group at Princeton. 

He received his B.A. in Spanish Literature & Culture and his M.A. in Latin American and Iberian Studies from the University of Notre Dame, where he wrote an honors thesis on ecclesiastical corruption in Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta. At Notre Dame, he taught introductory Spanish (101 & 102). Additionally, at Princeton, he has taught Intermediate/Advanced Spanish (107) and has taught as a preceptor for the course “Identity in the Hispanic World” with Professor Christina Lee. A fundamental aspect of this course was the trip to Antigua, Guatemala, where he helped to organize a partnership with a local NGO.