Luis Achondo
Assistant Professor
Ethnomusicology and Musicology
B.M. (UC Chile)
M.A. (UC Chile)
M.A. (Brown University)
Ph.D. (Brown University)
Luis Achondo is a music scholar who studies Latin American expressive cultures in contexts of violence and precarity. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Brown University and has previously held postdoctoral positions at Case Western Reserve University and Universidad Católica de Chile.
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.