SPEAKERS
Dr Thea Pitman
Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, University of Leeds
Current research interests: Contemporary Latin American cultural production, in particular online, and more broadly digital, works: tactical media, blogs, hypertext/media narrative, social media, indigenous new media, internet ethnography. Current research project: discourses of identity in Latin American internet cultures. Research interests also cover literature, especially travel writing, film and popular cultural forms, with a particular interest in materials of Mexican and Chicana/o origin.
For more information about current projects see the Digital Latin American Cultures Network on Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter (@latamcyber).
Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies, University of Leeds
Current research interests: Contemporary Latin American cultural production, in particular online, and more broadly digital, works: tactical media, blogs, hypertext/media narrative, social media, indigenous new media, internet ethnography. Current research project: discourses of identity in Latin American internet cultures. Research interests also cover literature, especially travel writing, film and popular cultural forms, with a particular interest in materials of Mexican and Chicana/o origin.
For more information about current projects see the Digital Latin American Cultures Network on Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter (@latamcyber).
Rebecca Fell
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge
Becky is a former Chartered Accountant at Deloitte, specialising as technician in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs). She recently decided to return to Cambridge University to do the PhD she spent years she’d wished she’d continued to do, starting in October 2015. Becky did her undergraduate studies (BA in French and Spanish) and the MPhil in European Literature at Cambridge University. Her PhD research project explores the role of ‘gossip’ in late 19th Century and early 20th Century Hispanic literature. In its most obvious form, gossip operates as a thematic device for plot construction and internal ‘commentary’ on the nature and behaviours of characters. However, she is also exploring gossip as a metaphor for the medium of the novel of this period. Her research thus encompasses three, interdependent strands: gossip as dialogue, gossip as catechism and gossip as discourse.
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge
Becky is a former Chartered Accountant at Deloitte, specialising as technician in International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs). She recently decided to return to Cambridge University to do the PhD she spent years she’d wished she’d continued to do, starting in October 2015. Becky did her undergraduate studies (BA in French and Spanish) and the MPhil in European Literature at Cambridge University. Her PhD research project explores the role of ‘gossip’ in late 19th Century and early 20th Century Hispanic literature. In its most obvious form, gossip operates as a thematic device for plot construction and internal ‘commentary’ on the nature and behaviours of characters. However, she is also exploring gossip as a metaphor for the medium of the novel of this period. Her research thus encompasses three, interdependent strands: gossip as dialogue, gossip as catechism and gossip as discourse.
Emily Baker
PhD Candidate, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
PhD Research: Nazism and the Second World War in Contemporary Latin American Literature
Emily’s project begins with the observation that nazism and the Second World War have become increased preoccupations for Latin American authors over the last two decades. Prior to this, the region’s literary exploration into the theme saw sporadic (but significant) offerings including various of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories and essays, Jose Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos (1967), Carlos Fuentes’ Cambio de piel (1967), Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (1980), and Sergo Pitol’s El desfile del amor (1984). However, since 1996 there has been a steady stream of different insights into the topic which pose questions regarding evil, otherness, fascism, authoritarianism, immigration, nation, alternative forms of community, philosophy, psychoanalysis, the limits of language and the ethics and politics of representation. This project aims to shed light on the commonalities and divergences between these contemporary works in their approaches to these questions. The authors included in the study are Roberto Bolaño, Patricio Pron, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Michel Laub, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla and Marcos Peres.
Before beginning postgraduate study at Cambridge Emily completed a BA in History, Literature and Culture of the Americas at the University of Warwick and a Minor in 'América Latina contemporánea' at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
PhD Candidate, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
PhD Research: Nazism and the Second World War in Contemporary Latin American Literature
Emily’s project begins with the observation that nazism and the Second World War have become increased preoccupations for Latin American authors over the last two decades. Prior to this, the region’s literary exploration into the theme saw sporadic (but significant) offerings including various of Jorge Luis Borges’ stories and essays, Jose Emilio Pacheco’s Morirás lejos (1967), Carlos Fuentes’ Cambio de piel (1967), Ricardo Piglia’s Respiración artificial (1980), and Sergo Pitol’s El desfile del amor (1984). However, since 1996 there has been a steady stream of different insights into the topic which pose questions regarding evil, otherness, fascism, authoritarianism, immigration, nation, alternative forms of community, philosophy, psychoanalysis, the limits of language and the ethics and politics of representation. This project aims to shed light on the commonalities and divergences between these contemporary works in their approaches to these questions. The authors included in the study are Roberto Bolaño, Patricio Pron, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Michel Laub, Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla and Marcos Peres.
Before beginning postgraduate study at Cambridge Emily completed a BA in History, Literature and Culture of the Americas at the University of Warwick and a Minor in 'América Latina contemporánea' at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Keylor Murillo Moya
Research Student, Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King's College London
Keylor studied at the University of Costa Rica, where he graduated with a B.A. in Spanish Philology (Language and Literature). A few years later he completed an M.A on the same subject and his final thesis for this degree was based on a semiotic study of the concepts of 'image' and 'metaphor' in several essays of José Lezama Lima. After that, Keylor started to teach Spanish as a foreign language in several countries, including Costa Rica, Egypt and Scotland. He has also taught modules on Latin American Literature, Literary Theory and Linguistics. He started his PhD in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King's College London in 2014 and his research focuses on the work of José Lezama Lima and the concepts of 'phantasia' and visuality. He has taken part in several conferences and symposiums about Latin American literature and culture.
Research Student, Department of Spanish, Portuguese & Latin American Studies, King's College London
Keylor studied at the University of Costa Rica, where he graduated with a B.A. in Spanish Philology (Language and Literature). A few years later he completed an M.A on the same subject and his final thesis for this degree was based on a semiotic study of the concepts of 'image' and 'metaphor' in several essays of José Lezama Lima. After that, Keylor started to teach Spanish as a foreign language in several countries, including Costa Rica, Egypt and Scotland. He has also taught modules on Latin American Literature, Literary Theory and Linguistics. He started his PhD in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at King's College London in 2014 and his research focuses on the work of José Lezama Lima and the concepts of 'phantasia' and visuality. He has taken part in several conferences and symposiums about Latin American literature and culture.
Leonardo de Barros Sasaki
PhD Student, Portuguese Literature, University of São Paulo
Leonardo de Barros Sasaki holds a Master of Arts in Portuguese Literature from University of São Paulo (2010-2012). He is a São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) Fellow at National Library of Portugal (BNP) and University do Porto (2012). Leonardo is a PhD student in Portuguese Literature from the University of São Paulo (2013- ) under supervision of Professor Annie Gisele Fernandes. As FAPESP Fellow at National Library of Portugal (BNP) and University do Porto (2015-2016) he is under supervision of Professor Rosa Maria Martelo. Leonardo is also managing-editor (2010- ) of Revista Desassossego, a peer-reviewed journal edited by the University of São Paulo’s Portuguese Literature Graduate Program.
PhD Student, Portuguese Literature, University of São Paulo
Leonardo de Barros Sasaki holds a Master of Arts in Portuguese Literature from University of São Paulo (2010-2012). He is a São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) Fellow at National Library of Portugal (BNP) and University do Porto (2012). Leonardo is a PhD student in Portuguese Literature from the University of São Paulo (2013- ) under supervision of Professor Annie Gisele Fernandes. As FAPESP Fellow at National Library of Portugal (BNP) and University do Porto (2015-2016) he is under supervision of Professor Rosa Maria Martelo. Leonardo is also managing-editor (2010- ) of Revista Desassossego, a peer-reviewed journal edited by the University of São Paulo’s Portuguese Literature Graduate Program.
Dr Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação
Teaching Associate, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
Dr Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo, where she also received a joint degree in Portuguese and English Studies. She is the author of a book on Northern Irish poetry, Exile, Home and City: The Poetic Architecture of Belfast (Humanitas, USP). It was during her lectureship in English Language and Cultural Studies at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) that she started to examine more closely the portrayal of Brazil and Latin America in English-language poetry. In order to expand her research, Dr. Carvalho da Annunciação came to the Centre of Latin American Studies in April, 2014 as a visiting scholar and Portuguese teacher. In the course of the year, she helped to organize the exhibition ‘a token of concrete affection’. This celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the first concrete poetry exhibition at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, which featured the Brazilian Noigandres group that was responsible for disseminating the movement in both the United Kingdom and Latin America. In April 2015, she was made a Teaching Associate at CLAS and a Senior Member at Robinson College and continues to research the Noigandres movement, tracing the intricate connections between Brazil, Latin America and Great Britain in Concrete Poetry. Her current research interests also include Brazilian and Latin American avant-garde, poetry and politics and new methodologies in language learning.
Teaching Associate, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
Dr Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of São Paulo, where she also received a joint degree in Portuguese and English Studies. She is the author of a book on Northern Irish poetry, Exile, Home and City: The Poetic Architecture of Belfast (Humanitas, USP). It was during her lectureship in English Language and Cultural Studies at the Federal University of Bahia (Brazil) that she started to examine more closely the portrayal of Brazil and Latin America in English-language poetry. In order to expand her research, Dr. Carvalho da Annunciação came to the Centre of Latin American Studies in April, 2014 as a visiting scholar and Portuguese teacher. In the course of the year, she helped to organize the exhibition ‘a token of concrete affection’. This celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the first concrete poetry exhibition at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, which featured the Brazilian Noigandres group that was responsible for disseminating the movement in both the United Kingdom and Latin America. In April 2015, she was made a Teaching Associate at CLAS and a Senior Member at Robinson College and continues to research the Noigandres movement, tracing the intricate connections between Brazil, Latin America and Great Britain in Concrete Poetry. Her current research interests also include Brazilian and Latin American avant-garde, poetry and politics and new methodologies in language learning.
Adjoa Osei
MPhil in Modern Languages (Portuguese), St Cross College, University of Oxford, Ertegun Scholar, 2014-2016
Adjoa graduated from King’s College London with a First Class Honours with Distinction in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Prior to this, she worked internationally as a professional dancer. Adjoa is currently coming to the end of a two-year MPhil programme at the University of Oxford, for which she was awarded the Ertegun Scholarship. Her research at Oxford has predominantly focused on Brazil and Portuguese Speaking Africa, assessing the representation and negotiation of identities across a chronologically extended period. This September, she will begin a PhD at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, looking at strategy and competitiveness in the Angolan and Brazilian creative industries.
MPhil in Modern Languages (Portuguese), St Cross College, University of Oxford, Ertegun Scholar, 2014-2016
Adjoa graduated from King’s College London with a First Class Honours with Distinction in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies. Prior to this, she worked internationally as a professional dancer. Adjoa is currently coming to the end of a two-year MPhil programme at the University of Oxford, for which she was awarded the Ertegun Scholarship. Her research at Oxford has predominantly focused on Brazil and Portuguese Speaking Africa, assessing the representation and negotiation of identities across a chronologically extended period. This September, she will begin a PhD at the University of Cambridge, Judge Business School, looking at strategy and competitiveness in the Angolan and Brazilian creative industries.
Dr Dominika Gasiorowski
Queen Mary University of London
Dominika’s research interests include Latin American cultural studies, particularly in relation to concepts of gender, race, identity, violence and visibility. She recently defended her PhD thesis entitled Representing Mexican Otherness: Subalternity in Maya Goded’s Socially Engaged Photodocumentary at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Professor Parvati Nair. Her latest publication is an article entitled 'Bodies that Do Not Matter: Marginality in Maya Goded's Photographs of Sex Workers in Mexico City' published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569325.2014.993308.
Queen Mary University of London
Dominika’s research interests include Latin American cultural studies, particularly in relation to concepts of gender, race, identity, violence and visibility. She recently defended her PhD thesis entitled Representing Mexican Otherness: Subalternity in Maya Goded’s Socially Engaged Photodocumentary at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Professor Parvati Nair. Her latest publication is an article entitled 'Bodies that Do Not Matter: Marginality in Maya Goded's Photographs of Sex Workers in Mexico City' published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569325.2014.993308.
Hazel Robins
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Queens College, University of Cambridge
Hazel Robins is a PhD student at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she is writing a thesis on how the 19th-century Portuguese writer, Júlio Dinis, uses British figures to re-negotiate Portuguese national identity. Her work explores Dinis's attempts to engage his readers in the nation on both an emotional and an intellectual level, through the playful negotiation of national types and happily-ever-after paradigms. Born in Brighton and currently living between London and Cambridge, her passion for all things Portuguese began in 2010 with a year spent living and working in Lisbon – and it shows no sign of abating.
PhD Candidate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Queens College, University of Cambridge
Hazel Robins is a PhD student at Queens’ College, Cambridge, where she is writing a thesis on how the 19th-century Portuguese writer, Júlio Dinis, uses British figures to re-negotiate Portuguese national identity. Her work explores Dinis's attempts to engage his readers in the nation on both an emotional and an intellectual level, through the playful negotiation of national types and happily-ever-after paradigms. Born in Brighton and currently living between London and Cambridge, her passion for all things Portuguese began in 2010 with a year spent living and working in Lisbon – and it shows no sign of abating.
Karen A. Brown
PhD Student, Hispanic Studies, Department of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews
Karen is a former school teacher and language tutor (of French, English and Spanish); she recently decided to return to full time education in order to earn a PhD at St. Andrews University. She began her undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies in 1996, before transferring to Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) in 1997. After that she earned an MPhil in European Literature at Cambridge and an MA in Creative Writing at Bangor University (North Wales). Her current research interests include translation studies, post-colonial theory and the Surrealist poets from Spain, France and Latin-America, but she also reads a lot of Francophone literature.
PhD Student, Hispanic Studies, Department of Modern Languages, University of St Andrews
Karen is a former school teacher and language tutor (of French, English and Spanish); she recently decided to return to full time education in order to earn a PhD at St. Andrews University. She began her undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies in 1996, before transferring to Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah) in 1997. After that she earned an MPhil in European Literature at Cambridge and an MA in Creative Writing at Bangor University (North Wales). Her current research interests include translation studies, post-colonial theory and the Surrealist poets from Spain, France and Latin-America, but she also reads a lot of Francophone literature.
Patrick O’Hare
PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Patrick O’Hare is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (Clare College) and currently a policy intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP). He holds a Masters (Honours) in Spanish and Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews and a Masters (Research) in Social Anthropology from Cambridge. He has conducted fieldwork research in Argentina and Uruguay with informal and formal sector recycling workers (cartoneros, clasificadores) and studies the politics, economics and cultures of waste. He is interested in the study of non-conventional labour organization, infrastructure, waste and landfill economies.
PhD Candidate, Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge
Patrick O’Hare is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge (Clare College) and currently a policy intern at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP). He holds a Masters (Honours) in Spanish and Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews and a Masters (Research) in Social Anthropology from Cambridge. He has conducted fieldwork research in Argentina and Uruguay with informal and formal sector recycling workers (cartoneros, clasificadores) and studies the politics, economics and cultures of waste. He is interested in the study of non-conventional labour organization, infrastructure, waste and landfill economies.
Dr Ben Hazard
University College Dublin
Benjamin Hazard is a Tutor at the School of History, University College Dublin (UCD). A graduate of University College Cork, he completed his doctoral studies in History at the University of Maynooth after conducting archival research in Spain, Rome and Belgium. From 2007 to 2010, he held the Louvain 400 Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCD where he successfully completed the Archives & Records Management MA in 2015. He has an established research record and published his Ph.D. as a monograph. His current research interests and publications relate to medical humanities; early-modern migration and travel; manuscript transmission and scribal culture.
For more details, see: benjaminhazard.com
University College Dublin
Benjamin Hazard is a Tutor at the School of History, University College Dublin (UCD). A graduate of University College Cork, he completed his doctoral studies in History at the University of Maynooth after conducting archival research in Spain, Rome and Belgium. From 2007 to 2010, he held the Louvain 400 Postdoctoral Fellowship at UCD where he successfully completed the Archives & Records Management MA in 2015. He has an established research record and published his Ph.D. as a monograph. His current research interests and publications relate to medical humanities; early-modern migration and travel; manuscript transmission and scribal culture.
For more details, see: benjaminhazard.com
Rachell Sánchez
PhD Candidate, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
Rachell did two bachelors degrees: one in Political Science and another one in History at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She then moved to New York to do a Masters in Regional Studies of Latin America and the Caribbean at Columbia University. She has since worked in VICE News and HBO editing, transcribing and translating different documentaries about Latin America and the United States, and is currently on her first year as a PhD student in the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge working on forced and coerced sterilization processes in Mexico and how these practices get embedded in imaginary ideas of what a national body should look like: whose bodies are able to reproduce and which bodies are pathologised within discourse.
PhD Candidate, Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge
Rachell did two bachelors degrees: one in Political Science and another one in History at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She then moved to New York to do a Masters in Regional Studies of Latin America and the Caribbean at Columbia University. She has since worked in VICE News and HBO editing, transcribing and translating different documentaries about Latin America and the United States, and is currently on her first year as a PhD student in the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge working on forced and coerced sterilization processes in Mexico and how these practices get embedded in imaginary ideas of what a national body should look like: whose bodies are able to reproduce and which bodies are pathologised within discourse.
CHAIRS
Dr Joanna Page
Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies, Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies, Director of Studies in MML at Robinson College, University of Cambridge.
Joanna Page’s research focuses on Argentine literature and cinema, Chilean cinema, and graphic fiction from Latin America. Her work engages with theories of science and culture, as well as new materialist and posthuman thought (particularly Latour, Serres, Stiegler and Braidotti), postcolonial theory, film and new media theories, and capitalism and neoliberalism in Latin America.
Her PhD research explored the relationship between postmodern experimentalism and political commitment in Ricardo Piglia’s fiction. Since then she has published Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2009) and Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism (University of Calgary Press, 2014 – PDF available on open access). A further book, Science Fiction from Argentina: Technologies of the Text in a Material Multiverse is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press (Spring 2016). She is also the co-editor of Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
She was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2012 and is currently Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded international research network "Science in Text and Culture in Latin America". At the moment she is co-writing (with Edward King) a book on technology and the posthuman in the Latin American graphic novel.
For more details on Joanna Page’s publications and links to downloadable/online essays, see http://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/staff/academic/joanna-page and http://cambridge.academia.edu/JoannaPage.
Senior Lecturer in Latin American Cultural Studies, Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies, Director of Studies in MML at Robinson College, University of Cambridge.
Joanna Page’s research focuses on Argentine literature and cinema, Chilean cinema, and graphic fiction from Latin America. Her work engages with theories of science and culture, as well as new materialist and posthuman thought (particularly Latour, Serres, Stiegler and Braidotti), postcolonial theory, film and new media theories, and capitalism and neoliberalism in Latin America.
Her PhD research explored the relationship between postmodern experimentalism and political commitment in Ricardo Piglia’s fiction. Since then she has published Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2009) and Creativity and Science in Contemporary Argentine Literature: Between Romanticism and Formalism (University of Calgary Press, 2014 – PDF available on open access). A further book, Science Fiction from Argentina: Technologies of the Text in a Material Multiverse is forthcoming with the University of Michigan Press (Spring 2016). She is also the co-editor of Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
She was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2012 and is currently Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded international research network "Science in Text and Culture in Latin America". At the moment she is co-writing (with Edward King) a book on technology and the posthuman in the Latin American graphic novel.
For more details on Joanna Page’s publications and links to downloadable/online essays, see http://www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/staff/academic/joanna-page and http://cambridge.academia.edu/JoannaPage.
Dr Rory O’Bryen
University Senior Lecturer in Latin American Literature and Culture, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Cambridge
Rory O'Bryen is interested in contemporary Latin American literature, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian culture and history. He is the author of Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of "La Violencia" (2008), and co-editor, with Geoffrey Kantaris, of Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect (2013). His current research explores the representation of Colombia's Magdalena River in poetry, narrative, film and visual art post 1850. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
University Senior Lecturer in Latin American Literature and Culture, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, University of Cambridge
Rory O'Bryen is interested in contemporary Latin American literature, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century Colombian culture and history. He is the author of Literature, Testimony and Cinema in Contemporary Colombian Culture: Spectres of "La Violencia" (2008), and co-editor, with Geoffrey Kantaris, of Latin American Popular Culture: Politics, Media, Affect (2013). His current research explores the representation of Colombia's Magdalena River in poetry, narrative, film and visual art post 1850. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
Dunja Fehimovic
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge
Dunja recently completed her doctoral thesis in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research investigates Cuban films released since 2000, looking at their articulations and reinterpretations of national identity, production processes and afterlives. Using existing discourses of Cuban national identity including Ortiz’s ‘cubanidad’ and ‘cubanía’, Bongie’s concept of island identity, Pancrazio’s logic of fetishism and Benítez Rojo’s ideas about repetition and order within chaos in the Caribbean, she explores how new generations of Cuban filmmakers are recycling rather than rejecting national identity. This project not only constitutes a much-needed update of Cuban cinema studies, which still so often focus on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the 1960s, but also gives a perspective on Cuba’s position within the current ‘postnational order’, as identified by theorists such as Appadurai. By balancing close readings of films with reflections on the changing nature of the film industry in Cuba, she aims to consider how, rather than rejecting national identity, new filmmakers’ work repeats with difference, or reconfigures existing patterns of Cubanness.
Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge
Dunja recently completed her doctoral thesis in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research investigates Cuban films released since 2000, looking at their articulations and reinterpretations of national identity, production processes and afterlives. Using existing discourses of Cuban national identity including Ortiz’s ‘cubanidad’ and ‘cubanía’, Bongie’s concept of island identity, Pancrazio’s logic of fetishism and Benítez Rojo’s ideas about repetition and order within chaos in the Caribbean, she explores how new generations of Cuban filmmakers are recycling rather than rejecting national identity. This project not only constitutes a much-needed update of Cuban cinema studies, which still so often focus on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of the 1960s, but also gives a perspective on Cuba’s position within the current ‘postnational order’, as identified by theorists such as Appadurai. By balancing close readings of films with reflections on the changing nature of the film industry in Cuba, she aims to consider how, rather than rejecting national identity, new filmmakers’ work repeats with difference, or reconfigures existing patterns of Cubanness.
Dr Mónica Moreno Figueroa
University Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cambridge
Mónica Moreno Figueroa's research has primarily developed around three areas: the lived experience of ‘race’ and racism; feminist theory and the interconnections between beauty, emotions and racism; visual methodologies and applied research collaborations. She has focused on Mexico and Latin America more broadly. The interest in researching the 'qualities' of the lived experience of racism, has taken her to the study of the everyday, the relevance of emotions and affect, as well as issues around visibility and embodiment.
Currently she is developing various research projects:
“Becoming Black: gender, racism and representation in the Costa Chica, Mexico” (2016) interrogates how the official recognition of blackness In Mexico has reconfigured tensions between mixedness and defined ethno-racial identities of indigenous, mestizo (mixed race) and black populations.
The British Academy funded project “Institutional racism and the logics of the contemporary Mexican state” (2016-2018), with Dr Juan Carlos Martinez (CIESAS-Pacífico Sur, Mexico) is a research collaboration that aims to strengthen the study of racism within scholarship on pluralism and legal anthropology and to understand how racism operates in the construction of the state. The project includes exploring three case studies that will analyse how the state defines and offers differentiated access to resources (water), services (health and reproductive rights) and legal recognition (Afro-Mexicans).
The £1m ESRC funded project “Latin American Antiracism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age” (2017-2019), with Prof Peter Wade (University of Manchester), will investigate antiracist practices and ideologies in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project will contribute to addressing problems of racism and racial inequality in the region and to shaping on-going debates there about how to conceptualise and label racism, anti-racism, discrimination and the idea of race.
University Lecturer in Sociology, University of Cambridge
Mónica Moreno Figueroa's research has primarily developed around three areas: the lived experience of ‘race’ and racism; feminist theory and the interconnections between beauty, emotions and racism; visual methodologies and applied research collaborations. She has focused on Mexico and Latin America more broadly. The interest in researching the 'qualities' of the lived experience of racism, has taken her to the study of the everyday, the relevance of emotions and affect, as well as issues around visibility and embodiment.
Currently she is developing various research projects:
“Becoming Black: gender, racism and representation in the Costa Chica, Mexico” (2016) interrogates how the official recognition of blackness In Mexico has reconfigured tensions between mixedness and defined ethno-racial identities of indigenous, mestizo (mixed race) and black populations.
The British Academy funded project “Institutional racism and the logics of the contemporary Mexican state” (2016-2018), with Dr Juan Carlos Martinez (CIESAS-Pacífico Sur, Mexico) is a research collaboration that aims to strengthen the study of racism within scholarship on pluralism and legal anthropology and to understand how racism operates in the construction of the state. The project includes exploring three case studies that will analyse how the state defines and offers differentiated access to resources (water), services (health and reproductive rights) and legal recognition (Afro-Mexicans).
The £1m ESRC funded project “Latin American Antiracism in a ‘Post-Racial’ Age” (2017-2019), with Prof Peter Wade (University of Manchester), will investigate antiracist practices and ideologies in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico. The project will contribute to addressing problems of racism and racial inequality in the region and to shaping on-going debates there about how to conceptualise and label racism, anti-racism, discrimination and the idea of race.
Professor Brad Epps
Professor of Spanish, Head of Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Professorial Fellow at King's College, University of Cambridge
Brad Epps is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor and former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University for over two decades.
He has published extensively on modern literature, film, art, architecture, urban theory, queer theory, and immigration from Spain, Latin America, Hispanophone Africa, and Catalonia, and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo; Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (with Luis Fernández Cifuentes); Passing Lines: Immigration and Sexuality (with Bill Johnson-González and Keja Valens); All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (with Despina Kakoudaki); a special issue of Catalan Review on Barcelona and modernity, and a special issue of GLQ (with Jonathan Katz) on lesbian theorist Monique Wittig.
He has taught as visiting professor or scholar in Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid), Germany, France, Chile, Cuba, the Netherlands, Sweden, the People's Republic of China, and Great Britain.
His research interests include eighteenth to twenty-first century Spanish and Latin American literature, Catalan literature and film, Ibero-American cinema, photography, and art, Hispanophone Africa, theories of visuality, modernity, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, feminist thought, queer theory, urban cultures, immigration, and post-colonial studies, among others.
Professor of Spanish, Head of Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Professorial Fellow at King's College, University of Cambridge
Brad Epps is Professor of Spanish and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Cambridge. He was Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and Professor and former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University for over two decades.
He has published extensively on modern literature, film, art, architecture, urban theory, queer theory, and immigration from Spain, Latin America, Hispanophone Africa, and Catalonia, and is the author of Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo; Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity (with Luis Fernández Cifuentes); Passing Lines: Immigration and Sexuality (with Bill Johnson-González and Keja Valens); All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema (with Despina Kakoudaki); a special issue of Catalan Review on Barcelona and modernity, and a special issue of GLQ (with Jonathan Katz) on lesbian theorist Monique Wittig.
He has taught as visiting professor or scholar in Spain (Galicia, Catalonia, the Basque Country, and Madrid), Germany, France, Chile, Cuba, the Netherlands, Sweden, the People's Republic of China, and Great Britain.
His research interests include eighteenth to twenty-first century Spanish and Latin American literature, Catalan literature and film, Ibero-American cinema, photography, and art, Hispanophone Africa, theories of visuality, modernity, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, feminist thought, queer theory, urban cultures, immigration, and post-colonial studies, among others.
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