Except from Alex's proposal:
I specialize in Polish, Spanish, and American languages and literatures, particularly in poetry and literature of the Holocaust, which first appeared to be an irreconcilable convergence of national literatures belonging to their own respective archives. I was convinced I would find only minor connections between Polish and Spanish national literatures. Thus, I was wary of forging a correlation based on some Spanish-language testimonies produced from Latin American refugees and Polish-language survivor testimonies, fearful that it would prove to be contrived, as that project would not demonstrate any uniqueness between testimonies from those two nations in particular. It was upon further investigation into more current social and political movements in Spain that I was able to find a Spanish joint that fit and functioned within a Polish socket in the overall body of this particular project. While I am not yet completely well-read in contemporary political Spanish scholarship, I was able to find a point of intersection between the poetry of witness that began to surface in the immediate wake of the Holocaust in Poland and current depictions of Francisco Franco’s mass executions in documentary and photography: representations of the physical and metaphorical body in mass graves, and the sociological, historical, and political implications of their excavation and subsequent preservation or destruction.