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Call for Papers | ‘Opera and the Spanish empire: Genres, encounters and translations, 1600 to 1900’ | Conference July 2025

Over the last thirty years, the Spanish empire has received increasing scholarly attention worldwide in an effort to resituate its history and legacies within a wider transnational network of political connections and exchanges from Mexico to Equatorial Guinea, the Philippines, and beyond. At the same time, historiographical debates have shed new light on the uniqueness of its power dynamics – often defined as an exception in the postcolonial paradigm – and the complexity of its cultural processes.  

The conference ‘Opera and the Spanish empire. Genres, encounters and translations, 1600 to 1900’ joins this debate from a musicological perspective: it brings musicologists and historians together for a new interdisciplinary discussion about the role that opera played in the history of the Spanish empire, from its origins until its collapse and even after, through the many legacies it left worldwide. 

The operatic world will be discussed as a narrative and performative space for imperial dynamics, as a social and political tool for the construction and questioning of the Spanish hegemony, but also as a permeable space of coexistence of different forms and languages throughout the centuries from Spain to Latin America, Asia, Africa and the rest of Europe.

Conference organiser: Dr Francesco Milella (IRC Postdoc, UCD School of Music and HI Resident Scholar)

UCD Humanities Institute

University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
T: +353 1 716 4690 | E: humanities@ucd.ie |