Samuel Llano
Samuel Llano
I am a music scholar and cultural historian, specialising in transnational studies, colonial encounters, race, and urban cultures. I serve as a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) of Spanish Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. I have authored various books and publications on music in Spain and the Western Mediterranean. I have recently completed the manuscript for The Empire of the Ear: Music, Race, and the Sonic Architecture of Colonial Morocco, which will be published by Oxford University Press later in 2025. This book delves into the role of music and aurality in shaping the Hispano-Moroccan colonial encounter (1912-1956), focusing on the creation of new forms of identification and the redefinition of racial categories. My research examines how emotional responses to music’s construction of coercive and resistant forms of identification are linguistically coded through scholarship produced in Arabic, Spanish, and French. What insights can the study of music’s role in the Hispano-Moroccan colonial encounter provide about the role of listening in fostering intercultural communication today?
My previous books analyse the formation of Spanish music nationalism in twentieth-century Paris (Whose Spain?, OUP, 2012); and how the intersection between music and perceptions of “noise” contributed to shaping public debates about poverty and marginality in nineteenth-century Madrid (Discordant Notes, OUP, 2018).
Although trained as a musicologist, I have worked in the Modern Languages since 2008. This experience has taught me to regard music within a continuum of communicative expressions, and appreciate what faculties music shares with language, literature, and the visual arts, as well as those unique to it.
I am excited to participate in “Arabic in Spanish” and examine how encounters between Arabic and Spanish in different contexts can bring new perspectives into the intermediality of words and music.
