Christopher Maurer ES’67, professor of Spanish at Boston University, and two colleagues were recently honored with the 2025 Philip M. Hamer and Elizabeth Hamer Kegan Award from the Society of American Archivists for their work on Memory in Motion: Lorca and the Archive.
This award recognizes those who have increased public awareness of a specific body of archival documents. Memory in Motion / Memoria en movimiento is a cross-continental, cross-collection effort documenting the evolution of the archives of renowned Spanish modernist writer Federico García Lorca, tracing them across nearly a century of salvage, discovery, acquisition, loss and perseverance. The project culminated in both a bilingual book and a museum exhibition.
For Christopher, the project is also deeply personal. “In SYA, on a bus taking us to Córdoba, Ángel Vilalta got to his feet and read us a poem by Lorca about death and desire that hooked me on the poet forever,” he recalls. That moment set him on a lifelong path of editing, translating and writing about Lorca’s work — eventually leading him to Spain, where he met Lorca’s family and worked with the poet’s manuscripts.
The exhibition in Granada, co-curated with Andrew A. Anderson and Melissa Dinverno, drew more than 14,000 visitors and told the extraordinary story of how Lorca’s family safeguarded his manuscripts during war, exile, and dictatorship. As Christopher notes, “When politicians heave the term ‘fake news’ back and forth and have few qualms about consciously inventing a past to their own liking, the archive has acquired more importance than ever as an agent of truth and social justice.” The exhibition opens in Madrid at the Residencia de Estudiantes in April 2026.