Professor Melissa Dinverno has won one of the most competitive and prestigious external awards in the humanities, a yearlong fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Professor Dinverno will spend the academic year 2024-25 working on her book project Mediating Memory: Federico García Lorca and the Legacies of the Past in Democratic Spain. The description of it is below.
My 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 asserts 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.
The College of Arts