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St Hugh’s graduate student awarded KVNM 2024 Hélène Nolthenius Prize

Congratulations to St Hugh’s doctoral student, Juan Carlos Méndez Álvarez  (DPhil Music, 2023), who has won the 2024 Hélène Nolthenius Prize, awarded by the Royal Society for Music History of The Netherlands (KVNM) (founded as Vereeniging voor Nederlandsche Muziekgeschiedenis and designated as ‘Koninklijk’ (Royal) in 1994) – The Netherlands’ professional association of musicologists. Juan Carlos won the prize for his MA thesis, entitled “Hauntologies of Music in Latin American Cinema”, in which he proposes a special method (the hauntological method) to study the role of music in Latin American cinema and analyses the soundtracks of three recent films: Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017), Pablo Larraín’s Ema (2019), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2019).

The judging panel were most impressed by the originality of the subject, the very well-researched methodology and the way in which the thesis combines various complex theories and concepts from various fields into an original and fruitful method that invites further applications. The analysis addresses not only postcoloniality, but also a number of personal and political issues in the case studies.

Under the supervision of Professor Jason Stanyek, Juan Carlos continues to explore Latin American film music from the perspective of hauntology for his doctoral thesis. Describing his doctoral work, Juan Carlos said, ‘Latin American cinema’s entanglements with nationhood projects, political militancy, and its historical role as a vehicle for regional preoccupations inevitably conjure recurring ghosts: the re-apparitions of evils thought vanquished, the longing for lost futures that were promised and never came, the poetic justice of imagined what-if presents, and a fragmented nostalgia for the half-remembered. In my doctoral project, I explore how recurrent ghosts are frequently conjured through sound and music in Latin American cinema. This conjuring does not occur through direct associations, but instead through indirect and ambiguous significations as remnants of that which is not fully present yet not fully absent. To analyse these cinematic instances, I propose an analytical framework that combines different forms of listening with the blurriness that hauntology and adjacent theories of haunting provide towards the non-present/non-absent ghosts of the past.’