Ignacio Fernández de Mata

Professor of Social Anthropology at the Universidad de Burgos. He imparts classes in the degrees of History and Heritage and of Audiovisual Communication. He also teaches classes in the doctorate of Heritage and Communications. At present, he is Assistant Dean of Humanities and Audiovisual Communication in the Faculty of Humanities and Education.

Trained in History and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad de Valladolid (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters), the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Faculties of Philosophy B and Sociology and Political Sciences), the Universidad de Burgos (Faculty of Humanities), and the Universidad de Deusto (Faculty of Philosophy and Education Sciences), he also received a Marie Curie Fellowship from the University of Kent (UK). He was, in addition, a Professor-Researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga (Colombia) in 1997, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA) in 2003-2004, and at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK) in 2006.

He is Director of the Research Group “Violence, Civil Conflicts, and War: Construction, Representation, and Effects” at the Universidad de Burgos.

His doctoral theses have focused on the management of collective identities and their political representation (from ethnohistorical parameters) and on studies of the remembrance of war conflicts and political violence. In addition, his lines of work deal with the history of Cultural Anthropology in Castile, on sources for studying culture, on the management of the past and uses of memory, on conflicts of representation and national identity, and on violence and trauma.

Some of his recent publications are:

• 2009. La cultura tradicional en la sociedad del siglo XXI. IV Jornadas Nacionales Folclore y Sociedad. Burgos: Instituto Municipal de Cultura [Edition, coordination, and two studies of his own].
• 2009. “In Memoriam… Esquelas, contra-esquelas y duelos inconclusos de la guerra civil española.” Revista Historia, Antropología y Fuentes Orales. HAyFO, 42. Barcelona.
• 2010. “The Rupture of the World and the Conflict of Memories.” In Jerez-Farran, C. & Amago, S. (eds.) Unearthing Franco’s Legacy. Mass Graves and the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.
• 2010. “From Invisibility to Power: Spanish Victims and the Manipulation of their Symbolic Capital.” In Payne, S. G. & Khazanov, A. M. (eds.). Perpetrators, Accomplices and Victims in Twentieth-Century Politics. Reckoning with the Past. New York: Routledge.
• 2010. “Mass Graves and the Emergence of Hispanish Historical Memory,” Published in Almansa, J. (ed.). 2010. Recorriendo la memoria – Touring Memory. BAR International Series 2168. Oxford: Archaeopress. Pp. 49-55. ISBN: 978-1-403-0712-1.
• 2011. “Rude Awakening. Franco’s Mass Graves and the Decomposition of the Spanish Transition Dream.” University of Minnesota Press. (at press). In Ferran, O. & Hilbink, L. 2011. Exhuming Bodies, Producing Knowldge. Collective Memory, Justice and Restitution in Contemporary Spain. Minneapolis: Minnesotta University Press (at press).

He has participated in numerous international conferences in France (Rouen, Marseille), the United Kingdom (Manchester, Norwich), Australia (Sidney), Ireland (Limerick), the USA (Madison, WI; Notre Dame, IN; Minneapolis, MN), Turkey (Istanbul), and Italy (Prato, Sardinia, Sicily).