- Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2000
- M.A., University of Michigan, 1994
- B.A., Kalamazoo College, 1990
Melissa Dinverno
Associate Professor (Profesora Titular), Spanish and Portuguese
Fulbright Scholar Liaison, IUB
IDAH Faculty Fellow 2023-24
Associate Professor (Profesora Titular), Spanish and Portuguese
Fulbright Scholar Liaison, IUB
IDAH Faculty Fellow 2023-24
My main area of research is 20th-century Spanish literature and culture, focusing specifically on five areas: García Lorca studies, memory studies, gender and sexuality, textual scholarship and editorial theory, and archival studies. I approach literature as an intervention in ongoing cultural debates; as such, my scholarship most often requires multi-disciplinary research. It also often involves a heavy component of archival research, with an aim to offering new perspectives on original materials and changing our visions of a work, an artist, an issue, or a moment. My first book is a major reconstruction, literary-critical study, and experimental critical edition of Lorca's posthumous poetic collection, Suites; my editorial work on Suites was also included in three important U.S. editions of Lorca. In 2020, I curated a major museum exhibit on Suites at the Centro Lorca in Granada, bringing the book to a wider public; during the COVID-19 crisis, the monograph Suites y el viaje de la percepción / Suites and the Voyage of Perception can be consulted for free on the Centro Lorca website. The draft of my second book project, Editorial Creativity and the Mediation of Literature, reflects on the theoretical implications and problems that are bound up in scholarly editing as a practice that mediates the reader's relationship to the literary work.
My current book project, Mediating Memory: Federico García Lorca and the Legacies of the Past in Democratic Spain, contends that the modernist writer’s ghostly presence haunts contemporary Spanish politics and society and traces it back to a pivotal moment in the country’s history: its transition to democracy (broadly understood as 1975-1992). Reading Lorca as a symptom of underlying socio-political tensions during the transition, I work with a range of cultural materials to elucidate what I argue are the unacknowledged memorial dynamics inherent in the polemics surrounding Lorca and his work at that time, and therefore the way the legacies of the transitional period continue to haunt contemporary Spain today and evince the dictatorship’s long shadow. This book project also contends that our understanding of Federico García Lorca, both in Spain and internationally, was in many ways forged in the fires of transitional memorial politics and is thus fraught with transitional legacies that still mediate popular and scholarly approaches to Lorca.
I've received a national research award from the Women's Caucus for the MLA for one of my articles and both internal (e.g. College Arts and Humanities Institute, Institute for Advanced Study, Institute for European Studies, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities) and external fellowships and grants (e.g. Bibliographical Society of America, the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spains Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities). In 2019-2020 I was awarded a a U.S. Fulbright Senior Scholar Award for Research to work on Mediating Memory and was a Visiting Scholar at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid affiliated with the Research Group “Literatura, Heterodoxia y Marginación”.
I teach a range courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, most often focusing on issues of power, cultural memory, and gender/sexuality. Examples of recent courses are Cultural Memory and the Negotiation of the Past in Democratic Spain, Contesting Repression: Spanish Fiction from the 1940s-1990s,“Hispanic Film, Master Directors: Almodóvar, del Toro, Amenábar and Iñárritu” and Gender and Hispanic Literature. I've received the IU Trustees Teaching Award twice, the Outstanding Mentor Award from our departmental graduate students, the MIND Award for Impactful Undergraduate Teaching, and have been nominated twice for the Indiana University Distinguished Teaching Awards. I was also granted the state-wide IU teaching award of induction into the Faculty Colloquium on Excellence in Teaching.
Proyectos Actuales de Investigación