Radical Care: Women, Antifascism, and Archival Silences in the Spanish Civil War

With the “Hear, Here” series, we aim to facilitate conversations around new research in the humanities. Faculty fellows at the Institute for the Humanities will discuss a part of their current project in a short talk followed by a Q & A session.

About this talk:
What can we know about women who crossed borders to fight fascism when their surviving stories were recorded largely by institutions that scrutinized their loyalty? This talk follows women volunteers from Poland, many of them Jewish migrants, whose work as part of the International Brigades, in the Spanish Civil War, turned care into a form of political commitment. Reading questionnaires, political assessments, letters, and photographs, it explores how communist organizations enabled women’s participation while subjecting them to gendered suspicion and unstable classifications of nationality and belonging. These fragmentary lives raise broader questions about how historians interpret archival silences, recover possibilities obscured by bureaucratic judgments, and write responsibly about experiences they cannot fully reconstruct.

Anna Müller is a 2026–27 Norman Freehling Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities and Professor of History and Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at U-M Dearborn.
Photo credit: Eastern State Penitentiary