Carmen Moreno Nuño focuses on the memory of the Spanish Civil War, which has become a central topic in Spain in the twenty-first century, generating a very heated public debate. Taking as a point of departure a new concept of memory that conceives of it as a contested site, she develops an analysis of the more than 440 articles written about the failed opening of poet Federico García Lorca’s grave in 2009–2010. García Lorca’s death, which epitomizes the horror of Fascism, is one of the most intriguing mysteries of the twentieth century. The failed opening of his alleged grave illustrates how memory has become a site of contestation, as the meaning of the missing corpse and its emblematic status is displaced by a new discourse that turns the opening of the grave into a spectacle.
Carmen Moreno Nuño is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on the cultural representation of the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and the postwar era in democratic Spain.
She is the author of Las huellas de la Guerra civil: Mito y trauma en la narrativa democrática (Madrid: Libertarias, 2006) and, in collaboration with Antonio Gómez López-Quiñones, has coedited the volume Armed Resistance: Cultural Representations of the Anti-Francoist Guerrilla (Minnesota UP, 2012). She has worked and published extensively on interdisciplinary studies (connecting literature with painting, film, comics, and photography) as well as on myth theory and war, trauma, and memory studies.
