Assistant Professor
Ethnomusicology and Musicology

B.M. (UC Chile)
M.A. (UC Chile)
M.A. (Brown University)
Ph.D. (Brown University)

lachondoparra@mun.ca
Room: SN-1047-A 
(709) 864-3984

Luis Achondo is an Assistant Professor at Memorial University. He holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Brown University and has previously held postdoctoral positions at Case Western Reserve University and the Catholic University of Chile. His research focuses on Latin American expressive cultures in contexts of violence and precarity.

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 (Wesleyan University Press, 2025), examines how sound mediates (trans)local and necropolitical relations among football fans in the Latin American Southern Cone. The book was awarded the BFE Book Prize—the British Forum for Ethnomusicology’s biennial prize recognizing outstanding scholarship in ethnomusicology.

His second book project explores how neocolonial and anthropogenic violence has altered how sound coordinates place relations among urban 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 the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Tinker Foundation, and Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development. His work has been published in edited volumes, the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Twentieth-Century Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Sound Studies, Soccer and Society, Journal of the Society for American Music, Journal of Musicological Research, and Resonancias.