Shirley Mangini (1946-2024)
Shirly Mangini in 2012.
Shirley Mangini, a professor emerita of Spanish at California State University, Long Beach, who served as ALBA Board member and Volunteer book review editor, passed away on October 11, 2024. Born near Pittsburgh, she lived in Madrid in the early 1970s before earning her graduate degrees at the University of New Mexico. After teaching for eight years at Yale, she landed at Cal State Long Beach, where she also directed the Humanities Center. She retired from teaching in 2004 and served on ALBA’s board from 1998 until 2009.
As a scholar of modern and contemporary Spain, Mangini helped rediscover the women who, as intellectuals and workers, helped shape the Second Spanish Republic. This part of her research, which relied on published work, archives, and oral history, culminated in three books: Memories of Resistance: Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (1995), Las modernas de Madrid, and a biography of the painter Maruja Mallo (2010). Mangini also worked extensively on the poets of the so-called Generation of 1950, who came of age in the early years of the Franco regime and one of whose most well-known members, Ángel González, was briefly Mangini’s husband. A broader investigation into the intellectual opposition to the dictatorship yielded her groundbreaking study Rojos y rebeldes (1987).
