The Department of History mourns deeply the passing of Professor Emerita Joan Connelly Ullman, who died on January 30, 2022, in California.
Joan Ullman, a distinguished historian of modern Spain, was born July 8, 1929, in New York City. She was a student at the University of California at Los Angeles from 1947-48, before transferring to the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned a B.A. in History and English in 1951. She went on to complete a master’s degree at Bryn Mawr College in 1953 and was awarded her Ph.D. from the same institution in June 1963. While at Berkeley, Joan was elected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Joan described her major field as the “History of Spain.” To spend time in Spain with Joan was to know how much she loved the country and how well she knew its culture and history. Her career began in Spain when, in 1953, after being commissioned as a U.S. foreign services officer, she was appointed as a political assistant for the U.S. State Department at the embassy in Guatemala, Spain, later moving on to the embassy in Madrid. Joan spent her time at the embassies translating documents and writing political reports. In 1957, she left diplomatic service to serve as the Director of Adult Educational Programs at the International Institute for Girls in Madrid. She remained at the institute until 1961 when she became the Dean of Student Life and Assistant Professor of History at Elbert Covell College of the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California.
Joan joined the University of Washington faculty in August 1966, as an assistant professor at a time when it was rare for a woman to hold a full-time, tenure-track position in the Department of History. She was promoted to associate professor in 1968 and to full professor in 1973.
Throughout her career, she held many honors. In 1972, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was also a Fellow of the American Association of University Women.
She retired from the UW in 1995 but continued to work on her study of the conversos, the Sephardic Jews who, at the end of the fourteenth and into the fifteenth century, converted to Catholicism.
Joan’s magnum opus was The Tragic Week: A Study of Anticlericalism in Spain, 1875-1912, which was published in 1968 by Harvard University Press, and then in 1972 as La Semana Trágica: studio sobre las causas socioeconómias del anticlericalismo en España by Ariel Press in Barcelona. In addition to numerous articles, she also translated Approaches to the History of Spain (University of California Press, 1970, second edition, 2022), by Jaime Vicens Vives.
We invite you to share your memories of Joan, which we will post below.