Madrid Institute for Advanced Study
Spain
fellow
Jacqueline Urla
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology; Cultural studies
Theme(s)
Other
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
She is a Francois Chevalier fellow at MIAS.
Jacqueline Urla received her doctorate in cultural anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research has ranged broadly on cultural politics, the ethnography of resistance, nationalism and language ideology in the Basque Country, as well as gender and visual anthropology. She is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Social Science Research Council, The Getty Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and U.S. Universities. She has served as member of the faculty of the University of Massachusetts Amherst since 1990, as well as Director of the Modern European Studies Program and coordinator of the William A. Douglass Chair in Basque Cultural Studies financed by the Etxepare Institute. In 2021 she was named Dean of the Graduate School.
Research Project
Searching for Amadeo: an intimate ethnography of the historical memory movement of Navarra
The proposed project entitled: “Searching for Amadeo: an intimate ethnography of the historical memory movement of Navarra” follows the author, an American anthropologist and daughter of an exiled republican family, on her journey to join the historical memory movement in Pamplona, Navarra, to discover the circumstances of her grandfather’s death in the massacre of Valcaldera on August 23,1936, and his subsequent transfer to the Valley of the Fallen. Searching for Amadeo shines a light on what the author calls, the ‘traffic in bodies’ as an important modality of Spain’s necropolitics. Bridging the humanities and social sciences, this project proposes the experimental format of intimate ethnography as an especially fruitful and revelatory method for understanding the multilayered subjective experience of memory work and the afterlife of violence on what Marianne Hirsch has called the “post memory” generation.
Research Interests:
Navarra; cultural studies