Luis Achondo completed his PhD in Ethnomusicology at Brown University in 2021. He has been hired to a tenure-track position of Assistant Professor at Memorial University in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Achondo was a HILLS Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University in the 2021-22 academic year, and then secured a three-year appointment as Fondecyt Postdoctoral Fellow at Pontificia Universidad Católica in Chile. 

About Luis Achondo

Luis Achondo is a music scholar who studies Latin American expressive cultures in contexts of violence and precarity. Drawing on ethnographic material from long-term fieldwork in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay, his first book, The Sounds of Aguante: Politics of Fandom in South American Football (under contract with Wesleyan University Press), examines how sound mediates (trans)local and necropolitical relations among football fans in the Latin American Southern Cone. His second book project explores how anthropogenic violence has altered how sound coordinates ecological relations among the Mapuche—the largest indigenous nation in the Southern Cone.

In addition, he is a guitarist with two decades of experience performing classical, avant-garde, and Latin American popular music. His musical background informs an ongoing side project on the history and politics of the guitar.

His projects have been generously funded by Fulbright, Tinker, and Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development, and his work has been published in edited volumes, Twentieth-Century Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Sound Studies, Soccer and Society, Journal of Society for American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, and Resonancias. He was also awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology’s James T. Koetting Prize and LACSEM Prize.