Joshua Newmark

Profile

I completed my BA in Combined Honours in Arts (History and Politics) at Durham University (2013–2017), graduating with First-Class Honours. During the 2015–2016 academic year, I was also privileged to undertake an Erasmus exchange year at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. After graduating I spent two years working as an English Language Assistant in the public education system in different parts of Spain, and studied for an MSc in History at the University of Edinburgh (2018–2019), achieving a Distinction. I have also worked as an academic translator for humanities research groups from the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHC).

Since October 2020 I have been studying for a PhD at the University of Leeds, funded by the AHRC via the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities DTP. During this time I have been a peer reviewer for the International Journal of Iberian Studies and an administrator for the Modern Spanish History Doctoral Seminar, as well as co-organiser of Anarchism in the Iberian Peninsula: A PGR/ECR Symposium (Leeds, June 2022). I have also been a tutor on undergraduate courses including HIST1055 ‘Historiography & Historical Skills’ and HIST1530 ‘The Making of the Twentieth Century’ . From September to December 2022 I was visiting researcher with the Grupo de Investigación de la Guerra Civil y Franquismo at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. I am privileged to be co-supervised in my PhD by Professor Peter Anderson in the School of History and Professor Richard Cleminson in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies. 

Presentations

• ‘Solidarity vs Separatism: The anarchist critique of catalanisme in the 1920s and 1930s’. Catalan Studies Symposium, University of Sheffield, 18 May 2023
• ‘Internacionalismo anarquista en la época de la Guerra Civil: Un esbozo de Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista’. Workshop Internacional. L’Espanya d’Entreguerres: Noves Línes d’Estudi. Centre d’Estudis sobre Dictadures i Democràcies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 9 March 2023
• ‘Anarchist Internationalism in Spain: The Mexican Revolution’. Edinburgh-Oxford Modern Spanish History Doctoral Seminar, online, 5 March 2021

Publications

• Newmark, Joshua (ed.), Remembering Spain: Essays, Memoirs and Poems on the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War (London: The Clapton Press, 2023).
• [Book review] Newmark, Joshua, Why Democracy Failed: The Agrarian Origins of the Spanish Civil War by James Simpson and Juan Carmona, Historia Agraria de América Latina 4. 1 (2023, 140-42..
• Newmark, Joshua ‘“Put rifles in their hands!”: Spanish anarchist solidarity with the early Mexican Revolution, WRoCAH Journal 6 (2022), 64-74.

Research interests

My doctoral project examines the role of internationalism in the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain during the period of 1910 to 1939. Internationalism encompassed a range of ideas and practices within anarchist thought, print culture, and activism both before and during the revolutionary upheaval of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). I delve into this broad interpretation of internationalism, and explore the ways in which it mobilised and was mobilised by anarchists during this period, drawing on an interdisciplinary literature on the relationship between the local and the global/transnational to consider how the anarchist movement navigated and negotiated the difficulties of building international solidarity. My period of study encompasses global events such as the Mexican and Russian Revolutions, the First World War, the rise of interwar fascism, and the Spanish Civil War — in many ways a prelude to the Second World War; rather than a backdrop to my thesis, it explores how the anarchists grappled with these events and their implications for the international revolutionary movement.

Qualifications

• MSc History
• BA Combined Honours in Arts (History and Politics & International Relations)