I got my PhD at the University of California at Berkeley in 1996, and I am currently Staff Researcher in the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology (ILLA) of the Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CCHS) at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). 

My research in the anthropology of the body, violence and social memory (both in Latin America and in Spain) encompasses two main ethnographic objects: the spiritist cult of María Lionza in Venezuela (I wrote my Ph.D. on this widespread form of popular religion) and, since 2003, the politics of memory in contemporary Spain, focusing the analysis on the current process of exhumation of mass graves from the Civil War (1936-1939), which started around 2000. 

Before being hired at CSIC, I have taught and conducted research at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Virginia, the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), the University of Utrecht, the Autonomous University of Morelos (UAEM), the University of Deusto and the University of Extremadura. 

I am presently Main Researcher of the research project The Politics of Memory in Contemporary Spain: A Decade of Mass Grave Exhumations, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (CSO2009-09681) and more recently by the Ministry of Economy (CSO2012-32709 and CSO2015-66104-R). You can check our comparative work in our webpage (http://www.politicasdelamemoria.org/). I have also been the CSIC coordinator of the VII FP Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) 'Sustainable Peace Building' (SBUILD). I was a member of the Management Committee of the COST action called In Search of Transcultural Memory in Europe (ISTME IS1203, http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/isch/IS1203). In the period 2016-2019 I am a member of the Management Board of the H2020 project UNREST  (http://www.unrest.eu/), leading a work package on comparative exhumations in Spain, Poland and Bosnia. 

In terms of publishing, I am the author of Escenarios del cuerpo: Espiritismo y sociedad en Venezuela (2004), Etnografías contemporáneas (2011), and El pasado bajo tierra: Exhumaciones contemporáneas de la Guerra Civil (2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMeCs5XbqAA). I am also co-editor of The Emotion and the Truth: Studies in Mass Communication and Conflict (2002), Before Emergency: Conflict Prevention and the Media (2003), Violencias y culturas (2003), Jóvenes sin tregua: Culturas y políticas de la violencia (2005), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Peace and Conflict Research (2007), Fontanosas 1941-2006: Memorias de carne y hueso (2010), and Necropolitics: Mass Graves and Exhuamtions in the Age of Human Rights (co-ed with A. Robben, 2015).