Research
My research broadly concerns the cultural production of Spain and Latin America with a focus on literary narrative, essays and performative forms.
Over the past years, I have been working on a series of interrelated projects about flamenco. In a short monograph, entitled Rhythm and Heritage in Modern Flamenco Guitar and published with Cambridge University Press in 2025, I apply perspectives from cultural studies, musicology and heritage studies to explore the musical and cultural dimensions of rhythm modern flamenco guitar playing. I am also working on a full-length monograph, tentatively called Flamenco after Franco: Performances of Memory in the Spanish Transition. In this book, I draw on theories and methods from cultural studies, performance studies and musicology to examine how flamenco music became a medium for artists and wider communities to express personal and collective memories of the Franco-dictatorship (1939-1975) during Spain’s transition to democracy.
Between 2021 and 2023, I was the Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded project ‘Flamenco after Franco: New Interdisciplinary Approaches to Performances of Memory in Post-Dictatorial Spain’, in collaboration with Dr Pedro Ordóñez Eslava from the University of Granada and with scholars and artists based in Spain, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Some of the outputs of this project will soon be published in an open-access special issue of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
A sample of my previous work can be found below:
Read my article (in English) on flamenco and social marginalisation in Dominique Abel’s film Polígono Sur: El arte de Las Tres Mil, published open-access in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (currently seventh in the journal’s history of most-read articles of all time).
Read my article (in English) on embodied memories of forced displacement under the Franco dictatorship in flamenco dance from Seville in Twentieth-Century Music.
Listen to my interview (in Spanish) with Pablo San Nicasio on chalauracom
.
Listen to my interview (in English) as part of the documentary “Flamenco Is Like the Sun” on BBC Sounds.
carlosvantongeren@soverin.net