Professor Alison Ribeiro de Menezes
Professor of Hispanic Studies
Deputy Chair (Research), Faculty of Arts
Tel: +44 (0) 2476 150719
Email: alison dot menezes at warwick dot ac dot uk
Fourth Floor, Faculty of Arts Building,
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
About
Alison's research focuses cultural memory in the Hispanic world, particularly memory as practice. She read Spanish and French at St Anne's College, Oxford, completing a DPhil in Spanish in 1997. From 1995 to 2012 she lectured in the Department of Spanish at University College Dublin. She moved to Warwick in 2012 to lead the establishment of the new Hispanic Studies department, of which she was Head until 2015. She is currently Deputy Chair (Research) of the Faculty of Arts.
Alison has held visiting positions at the Centre for Comparative Study, University of Lisbon; the School of Advanced Study, University of London; Brown University, Rhode Island; and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. Her research has attracted awards from the Irish Research Council, the European Union, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Current research
The Disappeared
Alison is currently writing a monograph on cultural engagements with disappearance in Argentine and Chilean culture, exploring the iconography used to both protest human rights violations and demand accountability for state terrorism. She also works with Ephemeral Ensemble on the award-winning theatre production, REWIND. The play is inspired by Alison's work on disappearance and her oral history research with Chilean exiles in the UK (below). You can listen to Alison discussing REWIND in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies (University of Notre Dame) post cast series here.
Other projects
Voices of Humanitarianism: British Responses to Refugees from Chile
How did British people respond to the plight of Chileans fleeing persecution after President Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup? What were the experiences of the approximately 3,000 Chileans who came to the UK, and how do they now remember the welcomes they received across the country?
This AHRC Research Development and Engagement Fellowship builds on Alison's earlier work on Chilean Exiles and World University Service, and explores the plight of Chilean refugees who fled the country after the military coup of September 1973, when the Chilean Armed Forces overthrew Salvador Allende's government. It also focuses on the memories of second-generation Chileans who grew up in exile, as well as the reflections and motivations of those who supported Chileans. Alison is working in collaboration with Dr Verónica Díaz Cerda.
The Virtual Spanish Civil War Project
Alison is interested in the public engagement aspects of academic work, and continues to be invited to contribute on memory in Spain. She is a member of the team which developed the first online museum of the Spanish Civil War.
Conflict Transformation in Colombia
Alison developed research on conflict transformation in Colombia in collaboration with Dr María Estrada-Fuentes (Royal Holloway, University of London). The project, supported by Warwick International Partnership Funds, includes collaboration with Alejandro Garzón and Otoniel Romero from the Agencia para la Reincorporación y la Normalización (ARN).
Chilean Exiles and World University Service
With Professor John King, Alison led an AHRC-funded project to explore and capture the history of Warwick's role in helping Chilean exiles, following the 1973 coup, thanks to World University Service. The story of WUS and its assistance to nearly one thousand Chileans was featured on the BBC's One Show in early 2018. WUS celebrated its centenary, with a major publication on its work.
Monographs
- Juan Goytisolo: The Author as Dissident (Tamesis, 2005).
- A Companion to Carmen Martín Gaite, co-authored with Catherine O’Leary (Tamesis, 2008).
- Embodying Memory in Contemporary Spain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Review online
Edited Volumes
- War and Memory in Contemporary Spain/Guerra y memoria en la España contemporánea co-edited with Roberta Quance and Anne Walsh (Verbum, 2009).
- Legacies of War and Dictatorship in Contemporary Portugal and Spain, co-edited with Catherine O’Leary (Peter Lang, 2011).
- Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War, co-edited with Adrian Shubert and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
- The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Spanish Civil War, co-edited with Adrian Shubert and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez (London: Bloomsbury: 2023; paperback 2025).
- Handbook of Memory Studies in Spain and Portugal, co-edited with Ellen Sapega (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming).
Journal Special Issues
- The Future of Memory in Spain, co-edited with Stewart King, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 94/8 (2017).
- Editor special journal dossier on Chilean Exiles in the UK, Journal of Refugee Studies; articles by Alison and Jasmine Gideon, introduction by Alison, 35/3 (2022).
- Editor, special issue of the Journal of Romance Studies, Entanglements of Memory and Sustainability, 25/1 (2025).
Recent Book Chapters
‘The Enchantment and Disenchantment of the Archival Image: Politics and Affect in Portuguese Cultural Memories of the Salazar Dictatorship and Carnation Revolution’, in Jennie M. Carlsten and Fearghal McGarry (eds), Film, History and Memory (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 65-82.‘From Liquid to Illiquid Modernity: Spanish Story-Telling in the New Millennium’, in Anne L. Walsh (ed.), Telling Tales: The Place of Story-Telling in Contemporary Spain (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), pp. 146-65.‘On Civil-War Memory in Spanish Women’s Narratives: The Example of Cristina Fernández Cubas’ Cosas que ya no existen’, in Peter Tame and Manuel Bragança (eds.), The Long Aftermath: Cultural Legacies of Europe At War, 1936-2016 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), pp. 60-73.‘Representing the Disappeared in Lita Stantic’s Un muro de silencio (1993)’, On Replacement, ed. Naomi Segal and Jean Owen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 147-158.'Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War', in Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War: Connected and Contested Histories, edited by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Adrian Shubert and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 1-18.‘The Necropolitics of Spain’s Civil-War Dead’, in Public Humanities and the Spanish Civil War: Connected and Contested Histories, edited by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, Adrian Shubert and Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 115-37.'Memory Beyond the Anthropocene: The Tactile Rhetorics of Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia de la luz and El botón de nácar', in Beyond the Rhetorics of Pain, edited by Berenike Jung and Stella Bruzzi (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 101-19.‘The Archival Turn in Portuguese Women’s Documentary Making’, Portuguese Women Filmmakers, ed. Hilary Owen and Mariana Liz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), pp. 150-168.'Tactile Translations: Re-Locating the Northern Irish Disappeared', in Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory and Culture, ed. by Suannah Radstone and Rita Wilson (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 27-40.'New Cultural Directions', in A Handbook of the Spanish Civil War, ed. Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez, Alison Ribeiro de Menezes and Adrian Shubert (London: Bloomsbury: 2023), pp. 463-480.Recent Journal Articles
‘Out of the Labyrinth? Television Memories of Revolution and Return in Contemporary Portugal’, Journal of Romance Studies, 16/2 (2016), 76-95.
'Introduction: The Future of Memory in Spain', with Stewart King, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 94/8 (2017), 793-99.
'Memory as Disruption: Entanglements of Memory and Crisis in Contemporary Spain', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 94/8 (2017), 883-901.
'Recovering Refugee Stories: Chilean Exiles and World University Service', Journal of Refugee Studies, 35/3 (2022), 1073-1088 (available online at: https://academic.oup.com/jrs/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jrs/feaa097/6135665?login=true).
'A Grammar of Care: Morality, Embodied Emotion and the Work of Reintegration and Reincorporation in Colombia', co-authored with María Alejandra Estrada Fuentes, Performance Research, 27/6-7 (2023), 136-143.
‘Surrogation as Intergenerational Transmission of Memory: Examples from Pedro Almodóvar and Inês Pedrosa’, in Paulo de Medeiros, ed. Journal of Romance Studies special issue, Memory, Trauma, Politics: A Lusophone Triangulation, 22/4 (2024), 131-152.
'Transgressive Memory: REWIND' (with Ramon Ayres), Contemporary Theatre Review, 34/4 (2024), 506-509.
'Entanglements of Memory and Sustainability', Journal of Romance Studies, 25/1 (2025), 177.
'The Disenchantments and Re-Enchantments of remembrance: ecologies of memory and violence in Trujillo, Colombia', Journal of Romance Studies, 25/1 (2025), 91-114.
Qualifications
- MA DPhil (Oxon).
Office hours
I will be available to meet students by arrangement. Please email to make an appointment.