Cesar Favila is associate professor of musicology at UCLA. He is the author of Immaculate Sounds: The Musical Lives of Nuns in New Spain (Oxford, 2023), which received the Sixteenth Century Society’s Natalie Zemon Davis Prize, and he is co-editor of the The Virgin Mary’s Essence in New Spanish Song (WLSCM, 2025), both available open access. His research explores the intersections of music history, art, and religion, and often examines how the sacred and the profane animate beliefs about salvation in the Ibero-American world. He is currently working on a project called Divine Eloquence, which analyzes the songs known as saetas, from their Franciscan missionary origins across the Spanish Empire to their contemporary vocalization in Andalusian Holy Week, to trace a transhistorical resonance of penitence and suffering in the teachings of the Catholic Church.
