Teaching and Research Associates

The Centre benefits from its relationships with a number of associates, who are not currently full-time members of staff but who are actively involved in research and teaching at the Centre. As well as scholars from Cambridge and the UK, these also include researchers based in Latin America who visit the Centre on a regular basis.

Teaching Associates

Research Associates

Honorary Emeritus Associates

Teaching and Research Associates
 

Thiago Dumont Oliveira

Research Associate
 

Thiago Dumont Oliveira holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Siena and he has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Basel, University of Turin, and Arizona State University. His research agenda focuses on natural language processing, network analysis, Latin American development, and the political economy of sustainability. He is currently investigating the coevolution of theories, practices, and conceptions of development in Brazil since 1930. This project aims to provide an in-depth account of the changing nature of development strategies in Brazil, unpacking its meanings and practices through the interrelated dimensions of knowledge-production, expertise, political praxis, and institutional sedimentation, contributing to policy frameworks that can accelerate the transition to inclusive sustainability in the Global South.

Email: to369@cam.ac.uk 

 

Peter Burke

Research Associate
 

Peter Burke was educated at St Ignatius’s College, Stamford Hill, London, and St John’s College Oxford. He was one of the first junior lecturers to be appointed at the University of Sussex, attracted by the interdisciplinary programme, and remained there for 17 years (1962-79). He moved to Cambridge in 1979, where he became Professor of Cultural History. He retired from the Chair in 2004 but remains a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. He is married to the Brazilian historian Maria Lúcia García Pallares-Burke, with whom he has written two books, Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (2008) and Os Ingleses(2016). He wrote regularly at one time for the (now extinct) ‘Caderno Mais!’, Folha de São Paulo, and his articles were collected as O historiador como colunista (2009).

He has been a visiting teacher or researcher in Berlin, Brussels, Canberra; Groningen, Heidelberg, Los Angeles, Nijmegen, Paris (the EHESS), Princeton (IAS and Department of History) and São Paulo (Instituo para Estudos Avançados). He is a Fellow of the British Academy; Member of the Academia Europea; Ph. D (honoris causa), Universities of Lund, Copenhagen, Bucharest, Zurich, Brussels and Oviedo; Honorary Professor of the National University of Colombia; Honorary Fellow of St John’s College Oxford.

He has published hundreds of articles and chapters as well as 30 books, from Culture and Society in Renaissance Italy (1972) and Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) to A Social History of Knowledge (2 vols., 2000-2012) and Exiles and Expatriates in the History of Knowledge (2017). His work has been translated into 33 languages. For most of his career he worked on the cultural and social history of early modern Europe, but now extends his investigations more widely to include Brazil and the 20th century. His Cultural History of Polymaths appeared in 2020 and his current project is a social history of ignorance.
 

Jennifer Castañeda-Navarrete

Research Associate
 

Jennifer Castañeda-Navarrete is Senior Policy Analyst in Policy Links, the knowledge exchange unit of the Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation Policy (CSTI), University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in Development Studies from the University of Sussex. Jennifer has 15 years’ experience in policy analysis in developing and developed contexts. Before joining Policy Links, she worked in academia and in the Ministry for Industrial Development in Yucatan, Mexico. Jennifer has produced reports for several international organisations, including: the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Asian Development Bank (ADB), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Key areas of her expertise include: industrial and innovation policy; policy design and evaluation; gender analysis; livelihoods studies; and mixed-methods research. Jennifer is a member of the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE).
 

 

Viviane Carvalho da Annunciação

Teaching Associate
 

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.

 

Julieta Chaparro Buitrago

Research Associate
 

I am a Latin American anthropologist and completed my PhD at The University of Massachusetts Amherst. I am currently a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge and a researcher of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group- ReproSoc under the leadership of Professor Sarah Franklin. Before this position, I was a lecturer in the Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University.  

My work seeks to understand how the colonial conditions of the present shape the reproductive lives of peasant and indigenous women, whether through aggressive population control programs or exposure to chemical environments. I understand that peasant and indigenous people’s reproductive decisions are shaped by long-standing structures that emerged during the colonial period but have outlived it. I am currently working on my book manuscript Decolonizing Reproductive Rights and the Cases of Forced Sterilization in Peru, where I map different registers of forced sterilization, including peasant women’s grammar of reproductive abuse, urban feminist reproductive activism, and the bureaucratic treatment of these cases in different state institutions. In this book, I argue that a hierarchy of discourse between them shapes a dominant understanding of reproductive abuse along repronormative assumptions, displacing other harms narrated by survivors, such as loss of strength and alteraciones that are not easily mapped within its boundaries. I am developing a second research project that expands my work on decolonizing reproduction by looking at how chemical exposure and extractive industries affect the reproductive lives of humans, animals, and the land.  
 

Katia Chornik

Research Associate
 

Katia Chornik joined CLAS in 2020. Her work explores cultural history, politics, human rights and memory in Latin America. Her first book, Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text (Routledge, 2015), discusses the roles of music in the works of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980). Her forthcoming book, Music and Political Imprisonment in Pinochet's Chile (OUP), blends archival sources with personal interviews with ex-political prisoners, state agents and other witnesses, examining wide-ranging lived experiences in political detention and torture centres, and how these are remembered, preserved, and disseminated decades later. Katia’s book is prologued by Michelle Bachelet, former President of Chile, 7th UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and ex-UN Women Executive Director.

Katia is the founder of the Cantos Cautivos project, which holds over 160 testimonies of music experiences under political imprisonment. Hailed as "an extraordinary digital archive" by The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, her project was featured in a British Museum exhibition and in manifold media reports. Katia is currently working with UNESCO, Chile’s Ministry of Education and the National Archive to create human rights education resources based on Cantos Cautivos, to be used by schools as part of the national curriculum.

Besides her articles in peer-reviewed journals, she has written for the BBC, The Guardian, Times Higher Education, The Economist, The Conversation, and Open Democracy, among other outlets. Katia’s research and engagement work has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust, Chile’s Ministry of Culture, and UNESCO. She has worked in HE impact management and in the cultural and public sectors in the UK and Chile. She is currently a member of the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement’s Inclusion Advisory Group and an Amnesty International volunteer. She holds degrees from the Catholic University of Chile, the Royal Academy of Music, and The Open University, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Cantos Cautivos project

Publications
 

Tanya Filer

Research Associate
 

Tanya Filer is Research Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Public Policy, where her work focuses on the intersections of politics and digital technologies and the emergence and regulation of GovTech in the context of democratic governance. She is interested in comparative perspectives and approaches that undo the idea of the Global South as passive recipient of digital creativity. She is currently completing an in-depth project chronicling the rise to prominence in contemporary Argentine political thought and policymaking of the people, practices, and ideas surrounding digital technologies and the informational affordances associated with them. Between 2015 and 2017, Tanya was a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, and a member of the interdisciplinary Leverhulme Trust Conspiracy and Democracy Project based at the Centre. She has held a number of fellowships, including at Harvard, Yale, the Library of Congress and the Universidad de San Andrés. Tanya serves on the Council on the Future of Information and Entertainment at the World Economic Forum.

 

Joshua Fitzgerald

Teaching Associate
 

Dr Joshua Fitzgerald is the Jeffrey Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow in “art as a source of knowledge” with Churchill College. In 2019, he received his PhD in History and a certification in Museum Studies at the University of Oregon, and, from 2019-2020, he interned with the Getty Research Institute (GRI) for the Florentine Codex Initiative for the Director’s Office. There, Josh was a text-encoder and content specialist for the critical digital edition of the Florentine Codex (forthcoming) and co-convened, with the UCLA Latin American Institute, the 2020 educator’s workshop “The Florentine Codex: Teaching the Spanish Conquest through Indigenous Eyes” for the Los Angeles Unified School Districts, CA. He has co-curated several museum exhibitions and conducted archival and archaeological research throughout Mexico and the U.S., and his publications examine place-identity theory, education as conquest, and the material and visual components of learning environments.

Josh teaches and supervises on pre-colonial and colonial Latin America, the History of Mexico, Spiritual Conquest Studies, Mesoamerican archaeology, and early-modern world history. His research interests include Mexico’s art and architecture, ethnolinguistics, the Science of Learning, human-animal communication, and ethnohistory related to video games. He is currently investigating indigenous materiality relating to food, animals, colour, and space. In Cambridge, Josh is seeking to amplify Indigenous Studies, help to develop ethnohistories of art projects, and publish his first manuscript (currently titled: An Unholy Pedagogy: The History of Mesoamerican Art, Architecture and Learningscapes under Spain, 1300 – 1700). His new research on Spanish colonialism and Indigenous reds (so-called cochineal) will be featured in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s exhibition Colour (2022) by Senior Curator Dr Anita Herle.  
 

Julieta Galante

Research Associate
 

Dr Julieta Galante is a UK National Institute for Health Research Postdoctoral Fellow and Senior Research Associate at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. She is from Argentina and studied medicine and public health at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She worked as a public health researcher in Buenos Aires before securing a PhD scholarship at Cardiff University in 2010.

Since then, Julieta's programme of research has been focused on public mental health improvement. She is passionate about conducting high-quality studies to devise mental health promotion interventions that consider peoples’ lifestyles, communities and environments. One aspect of this has been studying the effects of meditation techniques derived from contemplative traditions on individuals and communities’ wellbeing. She is now collaborating internationally to study mental health needs and possibilities of preventative intervention in Latin American communities under complex social situations.

See publications list
 

Liliana Galindo

Research Associate
 

Dr Liliana Galindo is a consultant psychiatrist with clinical and research experience in psychoactive substances and early interventions in mental health. She is a clinically-active psychiatrist working in the Adult Community Team (Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust) and a researcher in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge.

Lili is orignally from Colombia, and has been collaborating closely with the faculty of Medicine of Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, and in 2018 she was awarded the role of Profesor Ad Honorem. She also has teaching experience as a PhD advisor at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.

One of her main interests is resilience, prevention of violence and mental health. Her current research is focused on perception, learning and decision-making and how these may be altered in circumstances of mental illness. She has experience leading and coordinating research projects and multidisciplinary community-based interventions in the UK, Spain and Colombia.

See publications list
 

Sofia Gotti

Research Associate
 

Dr Sofia Gotti is Associate Lecturer and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the History of Art Department at the University of Cambridge, where she delivers the special subject course Alternative Art and Politics in Latin America, 1928-1988. Her research is invested in the intersections of Decoloniality, Indigeneity and Feminism. She is currently working on a monograph investigating the relationship between Pop Art, Popular Art and Folk through case studies in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Peru. A major output of her fellowship has been the online conference Worldviews: Latin American Art and the Decolonial Turn, which explores the ontological positions, modes of imagining the world and worldmaking that frame the study of Latin American Art.  Sofia has previously worked at the The Courtauld Institute of Art and the Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti (NABA) in Milan, where she taught modules on Countercultures in Latin America, Feminist and Postcolonial Theory through Exhibitions, Contemporary Art and the Anthropocene, and Art Markets. Her Phd was a collaborative studentship between UAL and Tate Modern, under the aegis of the exhibition The World Goes Pop (2015). She also obtained the Hilla Rebay International Curatorial Fellowship at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 2015, and has since worked as an independent curator with organisations including The Feminist Institute, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, FM-Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Mendes Wood DM. Sofia's writing is published in edited books and academic journals and she regularly contributes to contemporary art magazines. 
 

Aiko Ikemura Amaral

Teaching Associate
 

Aiko Ikemura Amaral holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex and she has an interdisciplinary background in Social Sciences (BSc, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil) and Political Science (MSc, University of São Paulo). Having previously researched the institutionalisation of indigeneity in Bolivian politics for her Masters, her focus has turned to the analysis of experiences of, and resistance against, intersectional forms of exclusion in people’s everyday lives. Her doctoral research explored the interaction between indigeneity, gender and class in contexts of social and spatial mobility through the narratives of Bolivian market women working in Bolivia and in Brazil. She has teaching experience in the areas of sociology, development studies and political science in Brazil and in the UK, and she is currently a teaching fellow at SOAS, University of London. Her research interests include racial regimes in Latin America and its articulations with gendered and class-based inequalities; urban indigeneities; globalisation, mobility and migration; and critical qualitative research methods.

 

Charles Jones

Senior Research Associate; Sometime Director
 

Charles Jones is a Senior Research fellow and Emeritus Professor in International Relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies, a Fellow of Wolfson College, and a former Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies. He has worked extensively on the past and contemporary international relations of Latin America, especially the Southern Cone, and is author of El Reino Unido y América (Madrid, 1992) and The North-South: A Brief History (London, 1983). Early work concentrated on economic relations between Argentina and Britain. A more recent book, American Civilization (University of London SAS, 2007), deals with hemisphere commonalities and contests the illusions of United States exceptionalism and western cultural homogeneity. Current research interests include Argentine nineteenth-century history.

 

Felipe Krause

Teaching Associate
 

I am a political scientist and former diplomat in the Brazilian Foreign Service (2007-2020). My main research focuses on the intersection between drug policy, social movements and political economy in Latin America. I am especially interested in social movements and other civil society groups that challenge the prohibition framework that has governed certain drugs for the last 100 years or so.

A key aspect of my work is to understand regulation and regulatory agencies, since they are a central piece of the prohibition framework. I find it fascinating that they are built to be impervious to pressure from organised civil society, and yet social movements, NGOs and other groups still manage to pierce through the various protective layers. What can we learn from this activity about how organised civil society is able to achieve policy goals and improve livelihoods across the region?

Another line of research concerns drug policy reform in the Western Hemisphere, viewed from an international relations perspective. As several countries begin to experiment with alternatives to prohibition, how can we assess the quality of these experiments? What, if any, are the possible next steps in terms of regional governance for drug policy?

Prior to coming to OSGA and the LAC, I taught at the Centre of Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge, with which I remain affiliated. I concluded my PhD in Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, and my MPhil in Development Studies at Oxford. 

Further information
 

Blanca Larrain

Research Associate
 

Dr Blanca Larrain is a social scientist and has a PhD in Social Development Planning at University College of London, UK. She studied psychology at Pontifical Catholic University of Chile followed by a Master in Sociology at Alberto Hurtado University and then completed an MSc in Social Development Practice at UCL. She has worked as a researcher, consultant, and practitioner, exploring social development, public policies analysis, citizen-state relationships (governance and participation) as well as gender and inclusion, mainly in Latin America and the UK.  

Central to her research ethos is the critical evaluation of public policies. Larrain adopts a holistic lens, encompassing the policy's lifecycle from its genesis. Beyond policy analysis, a significant tenet of her research is the exploration of citizen-state dynamics, unravelling the threads of governance and participation. By bridging academic insights with practical applications, Larrain’s collaborations span a spectrum of organizations, from international entities to grassroots NGOs, symbolizing her commitment to driving change at multiple levels.

She is currently working as a Research Associate at the Mental Health | Policy | Economics Group at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. She is investigating the social policy and practice related to harmful effects of digitalization on mental health, particularly for young people in Europe.
 

David Lehmann

Senior Research Associate; Former Director (1990-2000)
 

David Lehmann Emeritus Professor in Social Science in the Department of Sociology until his retirement from the University in 2012. He was Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies (1990-2000, 2010-11). From 1968 to the early 1980s he worked on Land Reform, rural social movements and peasant economies in Chile and Ecuador; thereafter he shifted his research focus to religious movements, Catholic and Evangelical, particularly in Brazil, and from 2000 he began to work on multiculturalism in the region as a whole, and on affirmative action in Brazil. He is the author of Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Post-war Period (Polity Press, 1990) and Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America(Polity Press, 1996). In 2006 he published, with Batia Siebzehner, Remaking Israeli Judaism (Hurst, 2006). Between 2007 and 2012 he held a British Academy Major Research Award to study  the spread of ideas about multiculturalism and interculturalidad in Latin America, and especially in Mexico, Peru and Brazil, focusing on the relationship between the politics of recognition, affirmative action and social justice. This led to an edited volume entitled The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Latin America (Palgrave, 2016) and to The Prism of Race: the Politics and ideology of Affirmative Action in Brazil (Michigan University Press, 2018), which was described in the American Journal of Sociology as ‘a model for how to do an empirical political sociological study of race’. In 2022 a new book, After the Decolonial: Ethnicity, Gender and Social Justice in Latin America will be published by Polity Press. Meanwhile he continues his research on evangelical Christianity in Brazil, London, New York and wherever else he happens to land. In 2016-2017 he held a Fellowship with the Centro de Estudios Interculturales e Indígenas of the Universidad Católica de Chile, and in 2018 he was a Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Bahia.
 

Paula López Caballero

Research Associate
 

Paula López Caballero is a Mexican historian and anthropologist working as a full-time tenured professor at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). She has been awarded the Baxandall Visiting Fellowship for a research stay at Robinson College (University of Cambridge) for the spring of 2024. She is currently preparing a new monograph, tentatively titled Experts of Everyday Life. A history of ‘fieldwork’ in Mexico and the United States, 1940-1960, in which she analyzes field notes and diaries to reflect on scientific practices, the implementation of indigenista and developmentalist policies, and the progressive institutionalization of the indigenous/mestizo divide in mid-century Mexico.

In her last monograph as a single author, Indígenas de la nación (2017), she explored how local forms of identification have been practised and changed over time (17th-21st centuries) in Milpa Alta, a district of Mexico City characterized by anthropologists throughout the 20th century as “purely indigenous.” In Beyond Alterity (2018), an edited volume she coordinated, specialists from various fields such as political history, history of science, and anthropology critically reflected on the attribute of “alterity” commonly associated with indigenous identification. In De Agua, de sangre y de ceguera (2023), her most recent publication, she edited, introduced, and published a series of field diaries and photographs taken in Chiapas and Oaxaca in 1945-46 by the explorer Franz Blom and the journalist Gertrude Duby. She has also published in journals such as Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Historia Mexicana, L'Homme. Her work has also been published as chapters or articles in the United Kingdom, Colombia, Argentina, Spain, Germany, and China.

In addition to her publishing activities, Paula is involved in the research and return of anthropological archives to the sites where ethnographic research was conducted. She has worked with Susan Drucker-Brown’s field notes, photographs, and diaries and with contemporary residents of Jamiltepec, Oaxaca (Mexico), where Drucker-Brown conducted fieldwork in the 1950s. An exhibition of this project will be held at the University of Cambridge in April 2024.
 

Marta Magalhães Wallace

Research Associate
 

Marta Magalhães Wallace holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Dr. Magalhães Wallace’s thesis looked at ideas about cosmopolitanism, processes of urban transformation, and violence in contemporary Brazil. Her research interests include political economy and social transformations; ethnography of the state; cities, space and the built environment; violence; memory; mental health; gender; ethics (especially ethics of care); and social theory. Between 2007 and 2011, Dr. Magalhaes Wallace was a postdoctoral research fellow at CLAS, where she convened the MPhil course on the Anthropology of Latin America. She is currently a research associate in social anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a collaborator at CRIA (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia), ISCTE-IUL (Lisbon). Dr. Magalhães Wallace has written extensively on space, citizenship and violence in Brazil. She has also written on history, memory, material culture and identity in Portugal (2009). In addition to her work in Latin America, Dr. Magalhães Wallace has recently started to do research on mental health in contemporary Europe.

 

Willie Makin

Research Associate
 

Guillermo A. Makin is an Argentine political scientist. He gained a First Class Honours Degree at Universidad del Salvador, Argentina, in 1976. His University of Cambridge PhD, completed in 1984, entitled Political Crises in Argentina: 1955 and 1975-76, led him to interview a large number of relevant political actors over the following 20 years. This body of original documentary material is the basis of his current project comparing Argentine institutional and political development on the 30th anniversary of the return of democracy. Makin specialised in relations between Argentina and the UK after the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee asked him to interview politicians in 1982-84. This is an on-going project. Makin is frequently consulted by the Argentine and the British media and has published numerous articles, papers and a book comparing presidential and parliamentary systems, Presidencialismo y Parlamentarismo: un estudio del caso británico (El Cid Editor). In the past he has held lectureships at the Universidad de Bologna (Buenos Aires) and the Universidad del Salvador and was appointed Professor by the Universidad de Belgrano in 2001.

Recent publications include ‘Los cambios en la Argentina democrática, 1983-2013’, a paper presented at a Round Table in London in December 2013, organised by the University of Notre Dame and the Kellogg Institute, and also available in a slightly altered text, in English, here. On British politics and the South Atlantic dispute with Argentina see ‘El triunfo de una nueva aristocracia: un modelo para pocos’, in Le Monde Diplomatique: Explorador, pp. 82-87, also at www.eldiplo.org.

Makin’s blog is at http://gamakin.blogspot.co.uk/
 

Charlie Nurse

Research Associate
 

Charlie Nurse is a modern historian and political scientist who holds degrees from the Universities of Manchester (BA) and Glasgow (M. Litt).  His post-graduate research was on the politics of the labour movement in Ecuador and was summarised in a chapter on Ecuador in “The State, Industrial Relations & the Labour Movement in Latin America”  (edited by Jean Carrière et al, 1989).  In the 1980s he worked in social development in Nicaragua and taught in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Nicaragua before becoming a travel writer, authoring the early editions of the Chile Handbook and the Argentina Handbook.  He was subsequently Senior Lecturer in Modern History & Politics at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising on Latin America and Spain and he has also worked for the Open University. He has taught courses on Latin American and Spanish History on the Cambridge University International Summer Schools programme and on Third World Revolutions at the Universidad de la Frontera in Chile.  His current research and teaching interests include the Cold War in Latin America, the Cuban Revolution, revolutionary movements, and contemporary political change in Argentina and Chile.

 

Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke

Research Associate
 

Maria Lúcia Garcia Pallares-Burke was a professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo, where she also graduated and obtained her Master’s , PhD and “Livre Docência” degrees. She has worked on the cultural history of the European Enlightenment and its reception in Latin America, and more generally on the circulation and reception of ideas in both European and Latin American contexts. She has also studied the intellectual trajectory of thinkers who had a great impact on Brazilian history, including Gilberto Freyre, his friend Rüdiger Bilden and Anísio Teixeira, a disciple of John Dewey, who fought a battle for the democratisation of education in Brazil from the 1920s until 1964. She is the author, among other works, of As Muitas Faces da História: Nove Entrevistas, a collection of interviews with a group of outstanding cultural historians (2000: - translated into Spanish, English, Korean and Chinese); Gilberto Freyre, um vitoriano dos trópicos (2006: it received the Senador José Ermírio de Morais Prize of the Academia Brasileira de Letras and also the Prêmio Jabuti), Gilberto Freyre: Social Theory in the Tropics (with Peter Burke, 2008) and O Triunfo do Fracasso: Rüdiger Bilden, o amigo esquecido de Gilberto Freyre (2012), which studies Bilden’s battle for the dissemination of the idea of Brazil as a “laboratory of civilization” and for the improvement of race relations in the USA. Her most recent publication is “A Two-Headed thinker: Rüdiger Bilden, Gilberto Freyre and the Reinvention of Brazilian Identity”, in Indigenous Visions – Rediscovering the world of Franz Boas, ed. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Lorado Wilner (Yale University Press, 2017). She has been a Visiting Scholar at Columbia University and the Freie Universität Berlin.

Comemorando 210 anos do nascimento da primeira feminista brasileira, Nisia Floresta (12 de outubro de 1810) Historiadora desvenda teia de erros em torno da feminista Nísia Floresta

mlp20@cam.ac.uk
 

Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra

Research Associate
 

Dr Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra is a filmmaker and Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Birkbeck, where she started working in 2018 following a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) at Queens’ College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first century Latin American art with an emphasis on the politics of aesthetics, feminist art, the body, art and ecology/technoscience, decolonial methodologies, and cross-cultural interactions between Latin America and Europe (including the United Kingdom). Her publications include Touched Bodies: The Performative Turn in Latin American Art (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019, shortlisted for the 2020 Book Prize of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present), Marcos Kurtycz: Corporeality Unbound (Mexico City: Fauna, 2024) and the edited volumes The New Public Art: Collectivity and Activism in Mexico since the 1960s (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2023), Sabotage Art: Politics and Iconoclasm in Contemporary Latin America (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2016), and Eugenio Polgovsky: Poetics of the Real/La poética de lo real (Mexico City: Ambulante-Tecolote Films, 2020).

As filmmaker, Polgovsky worked as a producer, co-screenwriter and assistant director for four documentary feature films by her brother, the late filmmaker Eugenio Polgovsky, and the educational projects Deworm the World (2008) and Learning Here and There (2010). Since 2017 she has dedicated herself to rescuing lesser known films, taking curated programs to the Lincoln Center in New York, Documenta Madrid, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, among other venues. She works as a consultant at various festivals in Mexico and the UK and is in charge of the distribution of Eugenio's films (in conjunction with the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and Piano Distribution). In 2022 she co-directed (with Eugenio, posthumously) her first feature documentary, entitled Malintzin 17, which premiered at the Tiger competition of International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and was awarded the Ojo for best documentary at the Morelia Film Festival.
 


Cristina Reigadas

Research Associate
 

Cristina Reigadas received her Ph.D. degree in Philosophy at the School of Philosophy, University of Buenos Aires. Since then she has been Tenured Full Professor at the School of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, where she is now Consultant Professor and Researcher at the “Gino Germani” Institute of Social Research. She is a Life Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.  

She specializes in political philosophy, ethics, sociopolitical theory, and critical Latin American thought. Focusing on contemporary social change, she has particularly worked on modernity and globalization, global democracy, contemporary theories of democracy, modernity and democracy in Latin America, deliberative democracy, civil society and voluntary associations. She currently conducts a research project on modernity and democracy in India and China.

Reigadas has compiled and co-authored over 30 books, including Entre la norma y la forma. Cultura y política hoy (EUDEBA, 1998), Globalización y nuevas ciudadanías (Editorial Suárez/IIGG, 2004), “Crisis y renovación de la democracia desde la perspectiva del diálogo intercultural. La cuestión de la democracia en China”, ¿“Quién le teme a Daniel Bell? De la crítica de la cultura de masas al posmodernismo cultural” (2014), Jürgen Habermas and Wang Hui. Modernidad y sociedad mundial: un diálogo intercultural” (2012), “Modernidad y religión en el pensamiento actual de Habermas” (2011), “Calidad institucional y populismo: dos visiones de la democracia latinoamericana” (2010), “¿Misioneros, militantes, tecnócratas? Hacia un cambio de paradigma en las asociaciones voluntarias en la Argentina” (2008), translated into Chinese Mandarin in the Journal of Comparative Economic & Social Systems  (JCESS), (www.bijiao.net.cn) (2014).

She has given lectures, courses and seminars at universities around the world, including Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, China and the UK, and has worked as a visiting professor with Professor Daniel Bell at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University, USA; Professor Thomas McCarthy at the Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, USA; Professor Bryan Turner at the University of Cambridge; and with Professor Alain Caillé at the Laboratoire de Sociologie, Philosophie and Anthropologie Politique (Sophiapol), Université de París X, France.  

She has been distinguished by the Institute of German and Latin American Culture (ICALA) for her contributions to the development of Latin American thought.
 

David Rock

Senior Research Associate
 

David Rock graduated from St. John's College, Cambridge with a BA and MA and holds a Cambridge Ph.D. He served as Research Officer in the Cambridge Centre of Latin American Studies and later moved to the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he taught Latin American history for more than three decades. His research interests lie in Argentina, a country on which he has published books and articles on nineteenth and twentieth century historical topics. The books include Politics in Argentina, 1890-1930. The Rise and Fall of Radicalism, based on a Ph.D. dissertation completed at Cambridge. He later published a synthetic general history, Argentina 1516-1987. From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsin. A study titled Authoritarian Argentina provoked by the Argentine military dictatorships of the 1970s followed. Another book titled State Formation and Political Movements in Argentina, 1860-1916, analysed the growth of the political system in that period. On returning to Cambridge, he hopes to complete a book on the British in Argentina tentatively titled 'Empire without Dominion: the British in the Río de la Plata from 1800'.

 

Andres Roman-Urrestarazu

Research Associate
 

Andres Roman-Urrestarazu, M.D., Ph.D., M.Sc., is an academic psychiatrist, public health clinician, and group leader at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Cambridge. He is also an Assistant Professor at Maastricht University and Visiting Professor at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile. Dr Roman-Urrestarazu was previously a Harkness Fellow in Health Policy at Stanford University and Gillings Fellow in Global Public Health (2016–2020). He is a Member of the Faculty of Public Health and a Board Member of the International Society for the Study of Emerging Drugs (ISSED), and worked as Civil Servant in the Centre for Health Technology Evaluation (CHTE) at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). He also currently leads the health system stream on the Lancet Commission on Problematic Use of the Internet. His research in Latin America is focused on Chile’s early years policy, and is based

 at the intersection of health policy and public mental health, with a focus on early child development and health inequalities with research in the field of conditional cash transfer and neurodevelopmental screening in low resource settings. Dr Roman-Urrestarazu’s work has been published in leading health policy and medical journals, including JAMA Pediatrics, BMJ, and Lancet Child and Adolescent Health, and has directly informed policy. In 2016, he submitted evidence to the House of Commons for the UK Psychoactive Substances Act, and in 2023 submitted evidence to the Online Safety Bill and . He has a Ph.D. in Psychiatry from the University of Cambridge, M.D. from the University of Santiago in Chile, and M.Sc. in International Health Policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

 

Maria Daniela Sanchez-Lopez

Research Associate
 

Daniela Sánchez-López is a Bolivian economist with an interdisciplinary background in political science, international development and human geography. She has a master's degree in Development Studies and a doctorate in International Development.

Dr. Sánchez-López has extensive research experience on critical mineral governance and the lithium-ion battery supply chain, socio-environmental conflicts and energy geopolitics. As a research fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre at the University of Cambridge, she focused her work on the environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues in the Lithium Triangle in South America as well as the sociotechnical implications of the new European Union battery regulation.

She also has extensive experience in public policy research in international organizations such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP-Bolivia), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Andean Development Corporation (CAF) and NGOs with regional experience in Latin America. She currently works as analyst of strategy at Nyobolt, a battery innovation and technology company in the United Kingdom.

Contact
 

Dolores Señorans

Teaching associate
 

Dolores Señorans is a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. In 2018, she received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Buenos Aires and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. For her PhD dissertation, she addressed the everyday forms of activism within popular economy through an ethnography of the Confederation of Workers of the Popular Economy, a union representing unwaged workers in Argentina. She studied their practices of organisation and their relationship with state bureaucracies focusing on how they demand and produce rights based on notions of what constitutes a life with dignity. Before coming to Cambridge she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Anthropological Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, and worked for the Government of Argentina in the design and implementation of public policies for worker cooperatives. As part of the research group Antropología en Colabor based at the University of Buenos Aires, she has also explored collaborative research methodologies with social movements and labour organisations. Her current research project focuses on the trade union organisation of migrant garment sector workers in Buenos Aires, examining the intersections between outsourced commodity production, South-South migration processes, popular urbanisation in the periphery, and collective labour politics in the city.

Email: ds761@cam.ac.uk
 

Jessica Sklair

Research Associate
 

Dr Jessica Sklair is a Research Fellow at the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies (Newnham College, University of Cambridge). She received her PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths in 2017 and held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute of Latin American Studies (School of Advanced Study, University of London) and the University of Sussex (SeNSS/ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship) before joining the MAC. Jessie’s doctoral research explored philanthropy among economic elites in Brazil and the UK and her postdoctoral work has looked at the recent emergence of ‘impact investing’, the practice by which private investors finance social businesses in the search for both social impact and financial return. Jessie is currently working on two collaborative research projects. The first of these looks at how DFID (UK) works with for-profit contractors and consultants, and the second explores processes of financialisation in development practice and financing in Brazil. Jessie has teaching experience in areas including development in Latin America, the anthropology of development, economic and political anthropology, qualitative research methods and visual anthropology.

Email: js222@cam.ac.uk
 

Tamara Wattnem

Research Associate
 

Tamara Wattnem holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin Madison. She specializes in the sociology of development and economic change, environmental sociology and critical agrarian studies. Her research explores the politics and implications of the deepening of extractivism in Latin America – particularly industrial agriculture, mining, and hydrocarbon extraction. She is currently engaged in two interrelated projects. The first analyzes the distinct trajectories of energy and mining policy throughout Mexico’s neoliberal era, with special attention to the role and reach of resource nationalism. The second project focuses on how and when the International Labor Organization’s Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention – more commonly known as the ILO Convention 169 – is used as a tool to both resist and legitimate extractivism. She has also written about global trends in seed legislation that erode farmers’ rights to save and replant seeds.

Honorary Emiritus Associates
 

Marcial Echenique OBE MA DArch RTPI RIBA 

Honorary Emeritus Associate
 

Marcial Echenique is a Fellow of Churchill College and Professor Emeritus of Land Use and Transport Studies, and a former Head of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. He is accredited, in particular, with early work on the integration of land use and transport planning. He has acted as a consultant to numerous government and local authorities and has directed major planning studies financed by international institutions such as The World Bank and The United Nations. He directed the influential study of Cambridge Futures (Royal Town Planning Institute award for planning innovation in 2000). In 2009 he was awarded an OBE for services to Urban and Regional Planning. Since 1990 he has been an advisor to successive Chilean ministers for planning infrastructure in cities.

He has published more than 100 articles and books, including 'Growing Cities Sustainably: Does Urban Form Really Matter?', co-authored with A. Hargreaves, G. Mitchell and A. Namdeo, Journal of American Planning Association (JAPA), vol. 78 no. 2 (2012); 'Land Use/Transport Models and Economic Assessment', in Research in Transportation Economics, vol. 31 (2011); 'Mobility and Income' in Environment and Planning A, vol. 39, no. 8 (2007);  'El crecimiento y desarrollo de las ciudades' and 'Las vías expresas urbanas: que tan rentables son?', in Santiago: dónde estamos y hacia dónde vamos, ed. A Galetovich, Centro de Estudios Públicos, Santiago de Chile (2006); 'Forecasting the Sustainability of Alternative Plans, The Cambridge Futures Experience' in Future Forms and Design for Sustainable Cities, ed. M. Jenks and H. Dempsey, Architectural Press, Elsevier (2005); 'Econometric Models of Land Use & Transportation', in Handbook of Transport Geography & Spatial Systems, eds. D. Hensher, K. Button, K. Haynes y P. Stopher, Elsevier Sciences (2004).

David Brading (1936-2024)

Honorary Emeritus; Director 1973-1990
 

David Brading read History at Pembroke College, Cambridge, from 1955-57. In 1960-61, he spent time in the United States as a Henry Fellow at Yale University, during which period he made his first visits to Latin America, specifically Cuba and Mexico. Brading undertook his PhD in 1962, with periods of archival research in Spain and Mexico. He graduated in 1965, the same year in which he was appointed assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, where he lectured on the history of Mexico, Peru and Argentina. His first book, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico 1763-1810 was published by Cambridge University Press in 1971. After a further two years at Yale, he returned to Cambridge in 1973 to take up the position of University Lecturer in Latin American History. From 1973-1990, he acted as Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies. In 1978 he published Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajio. Leon 1700-1860 which was based upon archival research in Mexico. It was followed, in 1994, by Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, the Diocese of Michoacán 1749-1810, which, like its predecessors, was based on local archives. But during the 1980s he had abandoned archival research in favour of an analysis and evocation of the printed sources that the Spanish conquest and settlement of the Americas had elicited. The unsuspected wealth of these materials was demonstrated in The First America. The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots and the Liberal State 1493-1867, a volume of 761 pages that covered the political and social development of Mexico and Peru in those years. This was followed by Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries, which revealed the richness of contemporary printed sources. Finally, in 2011, the press of the Congress of Peru published Profecía y patria en la historia del Perú. During the course of 2014 he completed a set of essays on colonial Mexico dealing with a variety of topics that will be published during 2015.

David Brading is an Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy.