The UB puts Mary Nash forward in the Princess of Asturias Awards
The emeritus professor of History Mary Nash has been put forward by the UB as candidate to the Princess of Asturias Awards in the category of Social Sciences. The candidacy, made at the proposal of the faculties of Geography and History and Philosophy through the Equality Commission and the deanʼs offices of both centres, has been approved of by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, which gives these awards during the second half of October in the Campoamor theatre in Oviedo.
The emeritus professor of History Mary Nash has been put forward by the UB as candidate to the Princess of Asturias Awards in the category of Social Sciences. The candidacy, made at the proposal of the faculties of Geography and History and Philosophy through the Equality Commission and the deanʼs offices of both centres, has been approved of by the Princess of Asturias Foundation, which gives these awards during the second half of October in the Campoamor theatre in Oviedo.
Mary Nash (Limerick, 1947) represents the commitment to defending equal conditions, human rights and the pioneering development of the history of women as a university discipline in Spain. Her works, translated into several languages, are linked to the history of women and feminism of the 20th century. Her brilliant thinking and her ability to express her ideas in academic terms make her one of the most important historians of our time. She is one of the academic figures who has contributed to renewing the Spanish historiographical panorama and disseminating knowledge on the history of women through activities in social and cultural media, such as curating exhibitions, dissemination books, television documentaries and conferences in public libraries and womenʼs associations and universities. The social impact of her historiographical and gender work has contributed to the advance of womenʼs equality and to the visibility of womenʼs voice and presence.
Educated at the universities of Cork, Turin and Barcelona, she arrived in Catalonia in 1968 and became passionate about finding the distinguished role of women in the 2nd Republic and during the Civil War, topic of her doctoral thesis, La mujer en las organizaciones políticas de izquierdas en España, 1931-1939. Since then, the history of women became the cause of her professional life. In 1974, she inaugurated a subject on the history of feminism and women at the UB, the first teaching institution in Spain to add this subject. She has been the director of the UB Research Group on Multiculturalism and Gender, and founded the Spanish Association for Research in Womenʼs History (1991) and the Centre for Womenʼs Historical Research of the University of Barcelona (1982), a forefather in the academic field in Spain. She also launched, in 1994, a pioneering magazine at the time: Arenal. Revista de historia de las mujeres.
Author of many publications, some of her outstanding works are Mujer y movimiento obrero en España (1981), Rojas: las mujeres republicanas en la Guerra Civil Española (1999), Mujeres en el mundo. Historia, retos y movimientos (2004), and Dones en transició: de la resistència política a la legitimitat feminista: les dones en la Barcelona de la Transició (2007).
She obtained the Emilia Pardo Bazán Prize for Presencia y protagonismo. Aspectos de la historia de las mujeres (1984) and the Catalan Government awarded her the Saint Georgeʼs Cross (1995). She received the President Macià Working Medal (2008) and the Narcís Monturiol Medal (2018). She was awarded an honorary doctorate in 2010 by the University of Granada and in 2018 by the Rovira i Virgili University. In 2017, she donated her personal archives to the University of Barcelona.