Scott Boehm
Scott Boehm is Assistant Professor of 20th/21st Spanish Culture and the Founder/Director of the MSU Latinx Film Festival at Michigan State University. He is also a Core Faculty member of the Global Studies in the Arts & Humanities Program, as well as an Affiliated Faculty member of the Film Studies Program, the Center for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies. He has served as the Graduate Advisor to the M.A. in Hispanic Literatures and Ph.D. in Hispanic Cultural Studies programs in the Department of Romance & Classical Studies since 2020.
A former Fellow of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, Scott helped launch UC San Diego's Spanish Civil War Memory Project, a groundbreaking digital humanities project and the world's largest audiovisual archive of survivor testimonies from the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, for which he conducted more than 50 interviews over a period of three years. While collaborating with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory he also worked on multiple mass grave exhumations and conducted archival research that formed part of the evidence compiled for Judge Baltasar Garzón’s historic 2008 investigation of Francoist crimes.
Scott's book project, Spanish Nightmares: Horror Film, Cultural Anxieties, and the Great Recession (under contract with Toronto Iberic/University of Toronto Press) examines the Spanish horror film production in relation to the cultural anxieties provoked by the Great Recession. He has published journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Spanish cinema, theater, history and politics, as well as the politics of historical memory and museum studies, in addition to encyclopedia entries, journalistic essays, feature articles and film reviews. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Spanish cinema, literature and cultural studies, as well as genocide, transitional justice and documentary film within a comparative global studies framework.
An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Scott has written, directed and co-produced two short films on immigration issues in the United States: What Happens to a Dream Deferred: A Short Film About DACA and Waiting For Ded: A Short Film About Sanctuary. He is currently working on his first feature length documentary film, 2015: ¿El año del cambio?, with a planned release date of 2025 in Spain.
Address: East Lansing, Michigan, United States
A former Fellow of UC Berkeley's Human Rights Center, Scott helped launch UC San Diego's Spanish Civil War Memory Project, a groundbreaking digital humanities project and the world's largest audiovisual archive of survivor testimonies from the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship, for which he conducted more than 50 interviews over a period of three years. While collaborating with the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory he also worked on multiple mass grave exhumations and conducted archival research that formed part of the evidence compiled for Judge Baltasar Garzón’s historic 2008 investigation of Francoist crimes.
Scott's book project, Spanish Nightmares: Horror Film, Cultural Anxieties, and the Great Recession (under contract with Toronto Iberic/University of Toronto Press) examines the Spanish horror film production in relation to the cultural anxieties provoked by the Great Recession. He has published journal articles and book chapters on contemporary Spanish cinema, theater, history and politics, as well as the politics of historical memory and museum studies, in addition to encyclopedia entries, journalistic essays, feature articles and film reviews. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Spanish cinema, literature and cultural studies, as well as genocide, transitional justice and documentary film within a comparative global studies framework.
An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Scott has written, directed and co-produced two short films on immigration issues in the United States: What Happens to a Dream Deferred: A Short Film About DACA and Waiting For Ded: A Short Film About Sanctuary. He is currently working on his first feature length documentary film, 2015: ¿El año del cambio?, with a planned release date of 2025 in Spain.
Address: East Lansing, Michigan, United States
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particularly if we consider the political upheaval triggered by the Great Re-
cession. Yet, as Manuel Artime astutely observed in 2016, what began as yet
another economic crisis, one with particularly dramatic political effects, be-
came a cultural crisis that has permeated all aspects of Spanish life and con-
sciousness:
De un tiempo a esta parte la palabra “crisis” se ha convertido en expresion
recurrente entre nosotros. Casi cualquier juicio emitido sobre el presente,
desde el más ponderado al más trivial, va a estar dominado por un mis-
mo diagnóstico, una misma conciencia; la de estar precipitándonos hacia
el final de una época, a un proceso de ruptura con el pasado inmediato.
De lo poco que nos atrevemos a aseverar con certeza en este momento de
incertidumbre, es que aquel orden social y de valores en que hemos estado
habitando, ha dejado de resultar aceptable para el futuro. (15)
(For some time now the word “crisis” has been converted into a frequent
expression between us. Almost any opinion voiced about the present,
from the most pondered to the most trivial will be determined by the same
diagnosis, the same consciousness: that of being plunged into the end
of an era, a process of rupture with the recent past. The little that we’re
willing to risk affirming with conviction in this moment of uncertainty is
that the social order and the values with which we have been living have
stopped being acceptable for the future.)
As Artime makes clear, the social order and corresponding values that charac-
terized Spain before the crisis no longer constitute cultural common sense, re-
sulting in the widespread feeling of living in a sort of end times. This is the point
of departure from which I would like to consider the (re)emergence of Spanish
neo-noir, which, following Gramsci, I consider a morbid cinematic symptom of
a cultural crisis provoked by neoliberal catastrophe.
particularly if we consider the political upheaval triggered by the Great Re-
cession. Yet, as Manuel Artime astutely observed in 2016, what began as yet
another economic crisis, one with particularly dramatic political effects, be-
came a cultural crisis that has permeated all aspects of Spanish life and con-
sciousness:
De un tiempo a esta parte la palabra “crisis” se ha convertido en expresion
recurrente entre nosotros. Casi cualquier juicio emitido sobre el presente,
desde el más ponderado al más trivial, va a estar dominado por un mis-
mo diagnóstico, una misma conciencia; la de estar precipitándonos hacia
el final de una época, a un proceso de ruptura con el pasado inmediato.
De lo poco que nos atrevemos a aseverar con certeza en este momento de
incertidumbre, es que aquel orden social y de valores en que hemos estado
habitando, ha dejado de resultar aceptable para el futuro. (15)
(For some time now the word “crisis” has been converted into a frequent
expression between us. Almost any opinion voiced about the present,
from the most pondered to the most trivial will be determined by the same
diagnosis, the same consciousness: that of being plunged into the end
of an era, a process of rupture with the recent past. The little that we’re
willing to risk affirming with conviction in this moment of uncertainty is
that the social order and the values with which we have been living have
stopped being acceptable for the future.)
As Artime makes clear, the social order and corresponding values that charac-
terized Spain before the crisis no longer constitute cultural common sense, re-
sulting in the widespread feeling of living in a sort of end times. This is the point
of departure from which I would like to consider the (re)emergence of Spanish
neo-noir, which, following Gramsci, I consider a morbid cinematic symptom of
a cultural crisis provoked by neoliberal catastrophe.