I am a musicologist and cultural historian specialising in the music and sound cultures of Spain, France and Morocco, with an emphasis on urban studies and transnationalism.

I earned my PhD from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in 2007. Before joining Manchester in 2015, I have been a Research Fellow in the University of Birmingham (2008-2011) and the University of Cambridge (2011-2014); and a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies in Durham University (2014-2015).

I am the author of two books. My first monograph, Whose Spain?: Negotiating ‘Spanish Music’ in Paris, 1908-1929 (OUP, 2012), explores the making of Spanish music nationalism in interwar France, and the impact of Orientalist tropes, and anti-German and Catholic pro-paganda on the construction of dominant ideas of “Spanish music.” In 2013 this book received the Robert M. Stevenson Award of the American Musicological Society for ‘outstanding research in Iberian and Latin American Music.’

My book titled Discordant Notes: Marginality and Social Control in Madrid, 1850-1930 (OUP, December 2018) studies the use of music and sound by minorities in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Madrid to negotiate their position in society and construct their identity. The study is mainly fo-cused on Madrid’s Gitanos, street musicians, and the workhouses. A Spanish translation of this book has been published with the title Notas Discordantes: Flamenquismo, músicas marginales y control social en Madrid (Libros Corrientes, 2021).

My research has recently veered towards the study of music in the context of the Franco-Spanish Protectorate in Morocco (1912-1956), in particular the role of music in helping to negotiate situations of conflict and shape strategies of resistance; and the role of listening in this context as a strategy of racial mapping and social engineering.

I have co-edited the following volumes: Spanish Sound Studies (special issue of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2019); Writing Wrongdoing (Tamesis, 2017); Heroes of Wrongdoing (special issue of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2017).

I am the editor for the special issue of Cuadernos de Música Iberoamericana (Madrid, ICCMU); and a member of the editorial boards of Diagonal (Journal of the Centre for Iberian and Latin American Music at UC Riverside) and the ‘Hispanic Music’ book series of the Complutense Institute for Musical Research (ICCMU), Madrid.

I welcome PhD students in the following areas:

- Cultural history of modern and contemporary Spain (19th to 21st centuries)

- Music in Spain and the western Mediterranean (Flamenco, Arab-Andalusi music, opera)

- Race and ethnicity in Spain and the Maghreb