Keene State is home to a diverse body of professors and staff who boast a number of honors and accolades. Each year, the Alumni Association presents awards to outstanding faculty who have excelled in their teaching and respective fields of study. This year, Professor Emily Robins Sharpe was presented with the Faculty Distinction in Research and Scholarship award for her years of work studying and unearthing works written about the Spanish Civil War. The Equinox sat down with Sharpe to learn more about her longtime career as a scholar that earned her the Faculty Distinction award.
Professor Sharpe primarily teaches in the English department on campus but has also taught cross-listed courses in women and gender studies (WGS) and Holocaust and genocide studies (HGS). Sharpe is the co-editor of a series of books that focus on Spanish Civil War literature by Canadian writers and a book that evolved from her dissertation, called “Mosaic Fictions: Writing Identity in the Spanish Civil War,” was published in 2020 by the University of Toronto Press.
“I started researching Spanish Civil War literature while I was a graduate student,” Sharpe shared. “I continued while I was working on my masters and then that work became my dissertation, and through that research I met somebody else who was another graduate student at another institution who had a similar interest. Just to see if it would work out, the year before I started at Keene State, we applied for a big grant to help our research and try and get these out-of-print novels and short stories and things back into print. We did not expect to get it because we were very junior, we weren’t even faculty anywhere. But then a few months after I arrived at Keene State, we found out that we got the grant, which meant we could start this print series and travel to archives and do all the work that ended up becoming this anthology.
“That grant ran out, and we ended up getting another one,” Sharpe continued. “And we were just thrilled because that allowed us to then create stipends for graduate students and undergraduate students to work on the project with us, and we could help them to travel to archives and get training. It’s been really exciting to get to work with so many people on this shared interest.”
This research journey spearheaded by Sharpe and her co-editors culminated in the publishing of two major works exploring the Spanish Civil War titled “Canada and the Spanish Civil War project” and an anthology called “Canada and the Spanish Civil War.”
Speaking on the process of working as a co-editor, Sharpe shared that “we’ve published multiple editions, because there has been so much written that went out of print, and also so much written that never made it into print in the first place. We started this series to get things back in print, get them really easily accessible, and as we were doing that work we realized that there was just so much that we, in addition, wanted to put together an anthology.”
“It took my co-editor and I more than a decade to finish all the work of assembling the materials for the anthology,” Sharpe said. “We started off thinking we’ll have some short stories, maybe some plays, definitely a lot of poetry written about the Spanish Civil War, that’ll be that. But then the longer we worked on it, the more materials we found.”
“We found letters that had been written the day that some of the soldiers were liberated from what was a prisoner of war camp,” Sharpe continued. “So we transcribed those and in some cases had to translate them into English. We found pamphlets and fliers and posters and all sorts of materials that were stuck in an archive– which it’s very cool if you can travel to an archive and see those things–but most people can’t travel the world to go see archives, and we wanted it all in one place. So the anthology ended up being way bigger than we thought that it would be and it came out in the Spring, so that was really exciting.”
Sharpe told The Equinox that she has composed another book that is “apparently coming out any day now” that is set to be published by the University of Toronto Press.
“[The new book] grew out of something that I found when I was in graduate school,” Sharpe said. “I was doing some of the coursework research, and I thought I saw that there was something interesting in an archive at New York University, so I applied for a small grant so I could visit New York for a few days, and I found this memoir written by a woman who was the only African-American nurse to travel to the Spanish Civil War. I thought that was super interesting and I looked into it more and more.”
“She did this incredible thing being a nurse in New York in the 1930’s who decides to leave New York and travel across the world to go to Spain and serve as a nurse on the battlefield,” Sharpe continued. “And then she participated in a lot of different autobiographical projects about those experiences, so I got really interested in her life and storytelling and politics. Her name is Salaria Kea O’Reilly.”
Sharpe shared that she wanted to bring O’Reilly’s writings into print as it was “something that she (O’Reilly) always tried to do.”
“Every time she tried to say ‘these were my experiences,’ other people would say ‘no, you’re lying’ or that she fabricated what happened,” Sharpe said. “I wasn’t there, and a lot of the people who were saying she was making things up weren’t there either. But whether or not these things were true– some of them we can prove or disprove and some of them we can’t–I still thought that the writing itself was really interesting and significant. There’s merit to fixating on whether or not the writing was true, but there’s also merit to thinking about why she was telling these particular stories and why she kept trying to tell the stories of her experiences over and over for decades. Why did she keep coming back to it and participating in documentaries that were made and being interviewed and writing? It’s really interesting to me that someone would spend 40 years trying to tell their story.”
“So, I kept that in the back of my head for a really long time,” Sharpe continued. “And then when I was eligible for a sabbatical, I decided that since I had just finished my book, I really wanted to work on this project more. I spent my sabbatical transcribing everything she ever wrote and a lot of her interviews, and I did as much research as I possibly could. These wonderful archivists scanned hundreds of pages for me of documents and ended up putting it together into a book manuscript, and then we sent it out to the publisher [University of Toronto Press] and it went through peer-review, which is when two people that you don’t know but who are experts in the field read the entire thing and give you tons of research, and they ultimately say whether this is worth publishing or not, so I did multiple revisions that they suggested and then it went to the board of the press, so it’s this lengthy process but they finally decided to publish it, which is thrilling.”
Sharpe shared that she took the time to track down members of O’Reilly’s family to ensure that they were supportive of the press publishing the work she had put together. “They were supportive of us publishing it, so right now I’m just waiting for the press to take my Word document and all the photos that I found of her and put it into the format of a book,” Sharpe said.
When asked what initially sparked her interest in the Spanish Civil War, Sharpe said that it was her undergraduate years that reeled her into the history. “I’m originally from Canada, I went to university at a school in Canada much like [Keene State]. In one of my Canadian literature courses, I noticed that a lot of the Canadian writers of the 1930’s were writing about the Spanish Civil War, and I thought that was weird. Like, that’s not what you would necessarily expect because Spain geographically remains pretty far away from Canada, and if you think about how travel has changed, it’s not as if folks in the midst of the Great Depression in Canada were largely getting on airplanes to go spend a week enjoying the sites of Spain.”
“So I was really curious about what connection they felt to this other country,” Sharpe continued. “It was in the years before the outbreak of World War II and the lead-up to the Holocaust, and it seemed really interesting then that into the 1940’s and beyond Canadian authors were still talking about the Spanish Civil War in tandem with the Holocaust, in tandem with World War II, and really thinking about their responsibility not only in Canada but in Spain.”
“The year after I graduated from University, I spent a year as a Language Assistant in the Madrid public school system because the government had decided to start offering bilingual education,” Sharpe said. “And they didn’t yet have enough teachers to fully staff that, so they were hiring recent graduates from around the world who spoke Spanish and other languages. I was placed in a wonderful public school, but what I didn’t realize was that historically the neighborhood that I was in had been a neighborhood with some pretty far-right politics, and in the midst of the Civil War that had been the overall sentiment of that neighborhood. So I started to learn more about that the longer I was there through meeting folks and talking to them and analyzing what people were comfortable saying and also what people, quite understandably, were not comfortable saying.”
“I remained really curious about that,” Sharpe continued. “I loved teaching and living there, and so then when I started my master’s program, I really wanted to keep thinking about the role of the Spanish Civil War in literature more broadly. I started reading everything I could find from that time period and realized that the Spanish Civil War is still very much a topic in contemporary literature as well, so I started making a more trans-national study of it.”
When asked how it felt to be recognized by the college for her work through the Distinguished Scholar award, Sharpe said that she was “really touched and really surprised.”
“It’s such an honor,” Sharpe said. “I know that the work that my colleagues are doing across campus is so important and in depth. I focus obviously very heavily on archival research and literary analysis from 20th and 21st century materials, but because this is a liberal arts college, I have colleagues across campus doing all sorts of things like running a lab or training and researching in the field of nursing or public health or history. It’s such an incredible campus for a diversity of important work that my colleagues are doing, and so I was really moved and honored to be recognized for the kind of work that I do.”
Sharpe shared that her background teaching courses across multiple departments on campus made her more grateful to receive the Distinguished Scholar award.
“The support for interdisciplinary work on this campus has been really foundational in the research that I’ve done,” Sharpe said. “It influences my teaching, but then my teaching has been so productive and inspiring for my research as well.”
“Some colleagues, you know how much they’re teaching, but we don’t always get to hear about the research that they do,” Sharpe continued. “So through teaching these crosslisted courses and working with HGS and WGS, I got more of a picture of the kind of work that my colleagues were doing in those departments. So again, it’s very inspiring and humbling to receive this recognition.”
Sharpe expressed that she feels very grateful for the students she has taught at KSC.
“It’s our conversations in class and outside of class that have propelled a lot of the research I have done,” Sharpe said. “There’s a whole chapter of my book that was inspired by class discussions from the first time I ever taught LGBTQ literature, and I was talking to the students about my book project, and they were asking me–because a lot of the writers who I was teaching them about had also written about the Spanish Civil War–if anyone had ever actually written about queer war literature. So I said, ‘I don’t think so, let me go find out for you.’ And when I looked, I couldn’t find anything, and it became so clear to me that I need to write about that, but I don’t know that I would’ve come to that realization without those wonderful classroom discussions.”
“I taught a women’s war literature and an archival war literature course, and in those courses the students and I were reading my digitized copies of Salaria Key O’Reilly’s life writings,” Sharpe continued. “And the students were really interested and had really great insight, so I would sort of say to them, like ‘do you think anybody beyond our class would be interested in this because I’m sort of thinking of doing a book’ and they were so encouraging. That has meant so much to me, not just the students in those classes but more generally the classroom discussions that I have with students I always find really inspiring for getting my research done.”
“I think sometimes the ideas that occur to you as an undergrad, or sort of early on, can be the ones that propel you in your writing, in your research, in your career path. It’s okay to change your plan and change what you want to do, but maybe the questions that you keep coming back to are the ones that send you forward,” Sharpe said.
In addition to performing research and teaching classes, Professor Sharpe will continue to make an impact on campus as co-director of the Honors program at KSC. Those interested in reading Sharpe’s work on the Spanish Civil War can purchase her book through the University of Toronto Press website or visit https://spanishcivilwar.ca to explore different facets of her research.
Serena Taylor can be contacted at
staylor@kscequinox.com
