Francesco Milella González Luna

Francesco Milella González Luna is Assistant Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid. His research focuses on musical networks across the Atlantic between 1750 and 1830, with particular emphasis on cultural transfers surrounding opera between Mexico and Europe. He obtained his Master’s degree in Musicology from the University of Milan and, in 2018, joined the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge as a doctoral researcher with a project examining the presence of Manuel García in Mexico (1826–1828).

 

In 2023, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship by the Irish Research Council to pursue a project on opera and modernity in the final years of the Spanish Empire at the Department of Music, University College Dublin.

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His research has been published by Cambridge University Press, Routledge, University of California Press, and Hollitzer, among others. He has received several prestigious international academic awards, including the IMS Outstanding Dissertation Award (2024), the Tesi Rossiniane Prize from the Fondazione Rossini (Pesaro), and first prize in the Otto Mayer-Serra Competition (University of California – Riverside) for the best musicological work on Latin America.

 

He regularly collaborates with academic institutions, festivals, and symphony orchestras across Europe and Latin America as a musicologist and music critic.

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Publications

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Books
Beyond Italian Opera: Manuel García in Postcolonial Mexico City, Pesaro: Fondazione Rossini, 2025.

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Translations
Senici, Emanuele, Musica al tempo presente: le opere italiane di Rossini alla loro epoca, Milan: Ricordi-LIM, 2025, tr. Francesco Milella González Luna (Music in the Present Tense, The University of Chicago Press, 2019).

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Book chapters
‘From Carlos IV’s Spain to the Mexican republic: Esteban Cristiani and Manuel García’, in The Cambridge History of Spanish Opera and Music Theatre”, Christopher Webber and Enrique Mejías García (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025, (forthcoming).

‘Mediating Threats: European Voices on Operatic Mexico (1820–1830)’ in Mediality in Music Theatre, Sarah Fuchs y Ingeborg Zechner (ed.), Baden-Baden: Rombach Wissenschaft, 2026 (forthcoming).

 

‘Bel Canto’ in The Cambridge History of Italian Opera from the Nineteenth to the Twentieth Century, Benjamin Walton y Emanuele Senici (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025 (forthcoming).

‘Opera and Modernity in Independent Latin America (1820–1825), in Opera in Transnational Contexts: Circulating Identities and Cultures, Barbara Gentili, Paulo M. Kühl y Clair Rowden (ed.), New York: Routledge, 2025 (forthcoming).

‘Italian Opera and Creole Identities: Manuel García in Independent Mexico (1826-1829)’, in Opera in Global and Transnational Perspective: Reimagining Italianità in the Long Nineteenth Century, Axel Körner y Paulo M. Kühl (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022, pp. 77-95.

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Peer-reviewed articles 
‘Independent Mexico City and the Limits of Operatic Globalisation’, Laboratoire Italien (‘Loin de l’Europe’, special issue), Céline Frigau-Manning, Matteo Giuggioli y Francesco Milella González Luna (ed.), 2026 (forthcoming). 

‘Narrativas paralelas: nuevas metodologías y documentos para una historiografía de la ópera italiana en el México independiente’, Diagonal: An Ibero-American Music Review, vol. 8, n. 1, 2023. 

‘Manuel García in Mexico City: (re)composing Semiramide in postcolonial Latin America’, Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 34, n. 3, 2023, pp. 246-268.

‘“De Papatachos avanza el coro”: Gioachino Rossini e la satira giornalistica nel Messico neoindipendente (1820-45)’, Bollettino del Centro Rossiniano di Studi, vol. 58, 2018, pp. 7-30.

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Book reviews
‘The Labyrinths of Global Opera’, Cambridge Opera Journal, vol. 35, 3, November 2023 , pp. 282-292. 
- Naomi André, Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2018)
- Charlotte Bentley, New Orleans and the Creation of Transatlantic Opera, 1819–1859 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022)
- Rogério Budasz, Opera in the Tropics: Music and Theater in Early Modern Brazil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

‘Offenbach in Spain: towards a transnational rethinking of XIX century zarzuela’, Hispanic Research Journal-Iberian and Latin American Studies, vol. 23, 6, 2022, pp. 558-561; Enrique Mejías García, Offenbach Compositor de Zarzuelas, Madrid: Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales – ICCMU, 2022.

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