Carlos Van Tongeren

My research broadly deals with questions of cultural memory and transition in Spain and Latin America, with a focus on literature, music and performance. As a scholar and musician, I am currently working on a series of interrelated projects about performances of memory in flamenco music. In a short monograph, under contract with Cambridge University Press, I explore the relations between concepts of rhythm and heritage in modern flamenco guitar. 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. 

My research about flamenco has been published open-access in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies (here) and Twentieth-Century Music (here) and presented in academic and public talks with the Plataforma Independiente de Estudios Flamencos Contemporáneos, the Flamenco Biënnale Nederland, and the Instituto Cervantes. 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.

Before coming to Manchester, I worked as an assistant professor in Hispanic Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. As part of previous research projects, I published a variety of articles about cultural memory, literature, and the intellectual history of melancholy. My first book, on the intersections between comedy and melancholy in Hispanic detective fiction, entitled Comedia y melancolía en la narrativa neopoliciaca (Vázquez Montalbán, Taibo II, Padura), was published with Brill-Rodopi in 2019.