Oliver Wilson-Nunn

Oliver Wilson-Nunn

Trinity Hall College
ojw33@cam.ac.uk

Biography

I graduated with a First Class with Distinction in Spanish and French (BA) at Cambridge in 2019, for which I was awarded the Mrs Claude Beddington Modern Languages Prize. Following this, I completed an MPhil at the Centre of Latin American Studies, supported by a Baillie Gifford Cambridge UK Masters Scholarship, achieving a Pass with Distinction. My PhD is funded by a Wolfson Postgraduate Scholarship in the Humanities. Currently, I am President of PILAS (Postgraduates in Latin American Studies), the postgraduate affiliate of the Society for Latin American Studies.

Research

In my doctoral research, I examine how popular audiovisual culture in Argentina has represented and engaged with imprisonment and processes of criminal justice. I begin with 1930s melodramatic cinema, pass through mid-century Peronist films, sexploitation cinema from the 70s and 80s, and end in the present day with both independent films produced by (formerly) incarcerated people and commercially successful series. In doing so, I aim to show how images of prison have constructed, moulded, and at times challenged hegemonic perceptions of modernity, criminality, punishment, justice, and (racial, gendered and class-based) otherness at different moments of Argentine history. My approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from film studies, cultural studies, criminology, and cultural history.

Publications

  • “Pedagogy Behind and Beyond Bars: Critical Perspectives on Prison Education in Contemporary Documentary Film from Argentina”. Latin American Research Review. (Forthcoming, 2022)
  • “Writing Between Evasion and Escape: Escapism in Reinaldo Arenas’s Arturo, la estrella más brillante”. Modern Language Review (Accepted)

Selected Conference Papers

  • “Making Space for Justice: Carceral, Domestic and Urban Space in Mid-Century Argentine Cinema”, panel chair, “Cines argentinos: otras lecturas”. Latin American Studies Association Conference (online). May 5-8, 2022.
  • “#NoLosLiberen: Fictional Framings of Prison Life and Mistrust of Prison Protest’, in the panel “Reimagining Protest: Cultural Mediations of Social Movements in Contemporary Latin America”, co-organised with Javier Pérez-Osorio. Society of Latin American Studies Conference, Bath. April 21-22, 2022.
  • “Writing Between Escape and Evasion in Arturo, la estrella más brillante (Arenas 1984)”. Postgraduates in Latin American Studies Conference (online). July 1, 2021
  • “(Un)Just Prisons: Incarceration in Classical Argentine Cinema”. Society of Latin American Studies Conference (online). April 16, 2021

Teaching at Cambridge

  • Course supervisor
    • SP1: Introduction to the Language, Literatures and Cultures of the Spanish-speaking World (2020-21)
    • SP5: Latin American Culture and History (2021-present)
    • SP13: Contemporary Latin American Culture (2020-21)
    • SPC1: Translation from Spanish (2020-21)
    • IL1: Ibero-American Cinema (2021-present)
  • Undergraduate Year Abroad Project dissertation supervisor (2021-present)
  • Undergraduate Final Year dissertation supervisor (2021-present)
  • Seminar leader
    • SP5: Latin American Culture and History (2021-present)
    • IL1: Ibero-American Cinema (2021-present)

Selected Organised Events

  • Conference organising committee, 2022 PILAS Conference, “Repair, Resistance, and Resilience in Latin America”, July 7-8, 2022
  • Conference organising committee, XVIII Congreso Internacional ALEPH, “Formas de pensar el cuerpo en las culturas hispánicas”, August 22 – 24, 2022

Research interests

  • Cultural representations of crime and criminal justice
  • Popular culture
  • Modernity theory
  • Emotion and affect theory
  • Spatial theory
  • Early cinema
  • Documentary film
  • Prison writing

Supervisor
Dr Joanna Page