Melissa Dinverno is an associate professor of 20th–21st century Spanish literature and culture in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University Bloomington. She has published on Spanish literature and film, modernist writer Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), cultural memory, trauma, archives, and editorial theory. She is recipient of an NEH Fellowship, was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Spain, and a visiting scholar at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid with the Literature, Heterodoxy and Marginalization Research Group.
For her fellowship year, Dinverno will work on accelerating the final manuscript of her book project Mediating Memory: Federico García Lorca and the Legacies of the Past in Democratic Spain, in which she contends that Lorca’s ghostly presence haunts contemporary Spanish politics and society and traces it back to a pivotal moment in the country’s history: its problematic transition to democracy (broadly understood as 1975–1992). Reading Lorca as a symptom of underlying social and political tensions during this period, Dinverno works with a wide range of cultural materials such as literary editions, film, theatre, archives, exhibits, newspapers, magazines, photographs, and biographies to elucidate what she argues are the still unacknowledged memorial narratives and dynamics inherent in the polemics surrounding Lorca and his work at that time, and therefore the way problematic compromises of the post-transitional period continue to haunt Spain today and evince the dictatorship’s long shadow. In turn, by exploring the imbrication of his iconic and textual construction with social and political processes, Dinverno also claims that our current understanding of Lorca was in many ways forged in the fires of transitional memorial politics and thus fraught with legacies that still mediate popular and scholarly approaches to Lorca.
Mediating Memory represents the culmination of years of interdisciplinary work and, with its multi-perspective approach (memory, trauma, exile, sexuality, etc.), offers Dinverno a generative platform for new scholarly and public-facing work in the future. The Fellowship’s focus on amplifying research and training academics regarding media, scholarly communication with the public, and projection more generally is also timely for her as she continues public-facing projects, considers new ones, and needs to lean on a deeper skillset for future public engagement.