Associate Fellows

Dr Michela Coletta is Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. Michela received her PhD in Latin American History from University College London. Her monograph Decadent Modernity: Civilisation and Latinidad in Spanish America, 1880-1920, published by LUP in 2018, shows the ways in which the idea of modernity was translated by Latin Americans to suit their own political and cultural narratives in the nation-building period and, in doing that, it brings to light the hopes as well as the anxieties that early-twentieth-century moderns felt about the idea of progress. As an intellectual historian who also trained in anthropology and favours collaboration across disciplines, Michela has published several co-authored works, including the volume Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (ILAS 2016 - OA) and the paper 'Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and the Politics of Plurality: Problematising Global Environmental Governance from Latin America through the Case of Bolivia' (Iberoamericana 2018 - OA). Her interest in understanding modernity from historical zones of extraction such as Latin America has led her to focus increasingly on modernity's relationship between the past and the future, for example in the connections between ecological and epistemic destruction, and question whether the modern idea of the future is viable. Is it sensible to rely on technological utopias? What does it mean to live well, and who is included in this question? The main project Michela is working on at the moment engages with South American philosophies of Buen Vivir; one of her questions is how we can draw from them to expand our idea of who we are to include the living world and care for the future of human as well as non-human generations to come. 

To follow

Camila holds a PhD in History from University College London, where she completed her doctoral thesis ‘Social Practices of Modernity: Cinema-going in Buenos Aires and Santiago, 1915-1945’. Before coming to ILAS, she was a Teaching Fellow in American Historical Cinema at the University of Warwick for the academic year 2016-2017. She is interested in
twentieth-century Latin American cultural history, particularly cinema reception and audiences.

During her time at ILAS, Camila will work on the project titled ‘Controlling the body: decency in Argentina, 1850-1945’. This research will explore ideas of decency as well as its connection with perceptions of the body in Argentina. The project suggests that this control was tightly connected to ideas of social hygiene and the moral health of society. The main sources will be behavioural manuals and censorship regulations, in order to explore the different ways in which control and order were exerted over behaviours that were perceived as unwanted and improper.

Grace holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge.  Her doctoral thesis looked at British policy towards the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile, 1973-82, and considered how policy-makers weighed up commercial and geopolitical considerations with human rights concerns. Her current research project is: ‘Ethics and Foreign Policy. The extractive industries in the Andean Region: the role and responsibilities of foreign governments.’  It looks at the response of foreign companies and governments to social movement protest against oil, gas and mining projects in the Andean region of Latin America, and examines whether oil and mining companies influence British policy towards Latin America. It also gauges the impact of human rights campaigns on the policy-making processes. She is also a journalist, specializing in Latin American affairs. 

She was The Guardian’s correspondent in Caracas and has also reported for the BBC World Service, the Independent on Sunday and The Observer.  She is the author of Inside Colombia: Drugs, Democracy and War (2003) and America's Backyard: Latin America and the United States from the Monroe Doctrine to the War on Drugs, (2009).   She has also contributed a chapter on ‘The United States and the Latin American Right’ to Geraldine Lievesley and Steve Ludlum (eds.), Rightwing Politics in Latin America, (London: Zed Books, 2011) and a chapter on  ‘Drugs and Criminal Organisations’ to Pia Riggirozzi and Chris Wylde (eds.), The Handbook of South American Governance, (Routledge to be published in April 2017).

Helen (PhD, King’s College London) is a specialist in race, ethnicity and identity in late colonial and 19th century Peruvian visual culture. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on an expansive visual archive of Afro-descendants, stretching from colonial travel accounts of Lima and classificatory projects of the Enlightenment, to Costumbrista iconography and photographic portraiture of the 19th century. She is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, where she is working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Hidden in Plain Sight: Visualizing Black Subjects in Late Colonial and 19th Century Peru. She has also been invited to contribute to The Image of the Black in Latin America and the Caribbean, a forthcoming companion volume to The Image of the Black in Western Art, published by Harvard University Press.

Claudia (Dip Arch, MA, MSc, PhD) is a researcher at the University of Reading. Her work focuses on urban development in Latin America, taking into consideration the region's unique cultural and political milieu. Combining historical and contemporaneous knowledge of the region, Claudia's work contributes to wider discussions on urban and peri-urban transformations in the Global South. Her main interest focuses on Latin America's changing socio-political relations with the land and its natural environment. She is particularly interested in housing and sustainability; land allocation and planning; informality and resilience; inequality and well-being. Her most recent work Real Estate and Urban Development in South America: Understanding Local Regulations and Investment Methods in a Highly Urbanised Continent, was published by Routledge in 2018 and she is currently working on a second volume covering Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean.

Malayna is an assistant professor in Latin American studies at Aalborg University. She is also an associate research fellow at the Human Rights Consortium, University of London, and the Centro Latino Americano de Ecología Social, Uruguay. Her research interests focus on environmental governance, natural resource development and human rights. Her publications include two co-edited volumes, Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (ILAS, 2016) and Nature Resource Development and Human Rights in Latin America (HRC, 2017), as well as an edited book on Social-Environmental Conflicts, Extractivism and Human Rights in Latin America (Routledge, 2018). Published articles include: Contemporary Debates on Socio-Environmental Conflicts, Extractivism and Human Rights in Latin America, International Journal of Human Rights; Promoting Renewable Energy or Environmental Problems? Environmental Politics and Sustainability in Sino-Brazilian Relations, Journal of China and International Relations; Building soft power by absence: Chinese mining in Greenland’, The Extractive Industries and Society. 

Jessica received her PhD in Anthropology from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2017. Her doctorate explored philanthropy among economic elites in Brazil and the UK, and the ideological foundations for the growth of ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in both countries. In parallel, it examined the role played by philanthropy in the creation of positive identities of wealth, and the building of historical narratives of social responsibility within business families. 

Jessica’s current research (partly funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant) looks at the financialisation of development in Brazil, with particular focus on impact investing - the practice by which investors finance social businesses and Bottom of the Pyramid schemes, in the search for both financial return and social impact. Jessica is interested in how this and related practices signify attempts by corporate and philanthropic elites – and increasingly, by national and international development agencies – to provide market-based solutions to enduring development challenges in Latin America, framing global capitalism as the solution rather than the cause of growing inequity and environmental destruction in the region.

Following completion of her Stipendiary Fellowship at ILAS, Jessica will be taking up a SeNSS/ESRC funded postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sussex. Jessica is a convener of the Development Studies Association Business and Development Study Group, and a board member of the social enterprise Sound & Fair (supplying the global musical instrument market with sustainably sourced wood from Tanzania).

Jean is founding co-director of the Commodities of Empire project; founder member of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative; Associate Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies (ILAS, School of Advanced Study, University of London) and the Institute of the Americas (University College London); and Professor Emerita of London Metropolitan University, where she directed the Caribbean Studies Centre (2002-2009). She is a member of the Academy of History of Cuba, and, since her early monograph Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860-1958 (Cambridge University Press, 1985), she has published widely on Cuba, her specialist interests spanning tobacco, labour, gender, race and migration.

She is currently co-editing the Oxford University Press Handbook of Commodity History (with Prof. William Gervase Clarence-Smith, SOAS; Dr. Jonathan Curry-Machado, ILAS, University of London; and Dr. Jelmer Vos, University of Glasgow). She is also working on two other books, one provisionally titled The Havana Cigar Universe: Transnational Migration and Commodity Production, 1756-2020 (single-authored) and the other Nation-Branding and the New Cuban Diasporas in Canada and Western Europe, 1989-2019 (co-authored with Dr Catherine Krull, University of Victoria, Canada). Her foundational work on Cuban tobacco, and especially the Havana cigar, has led her to trace cultivation, trade, manufacture, labour and consumption on a global scale, linking commodity and migration histories. Spanning the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries, her work draws on sociological, anthropological, and agronomic approaches as well as archival and oral history. Her work on contemporary Cuban migration builds on this to explore how commodity and nation branding have shaped the new Cuban diasporic mobilities.

Jean has also worked as a documentary film researcher, including with Prof. Michael Chanan (University of Roehampton) on ‘Havana Report’ (1986) and ‘Cuba from Inside’ (1988).

Vikram is a socio-cultural historian of Latin American and the Caribbean (PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison), whose research focuses on the Guyanas and the Black World. His dissertation "Black Powers and Bush Talk: Histories of Race, Radicalism, and Violence in Twentieth-Century Guyana," reframes the political history of twentieth-century Guyana using rumour and memory as a way to rupture the established ethno-racial narratives of the Guyanese past. As a Stipendiary Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Vikram is working on his current book manuscript on a long history of trafficking in the Essequibo. Additionally, he is writing a feature essay for the NACLA Report on the Guyanese-Venezuelan borderlands and completing an article on conspiratorial narratives surrounding the death of famed radical historian, Walter Rodney.