People
The Director coordinates the activities of the Centre and in consultation with the Steering Committee is responsible for developing strategic initiatives and priorities. The Advisory Board include members of staff from other subject areas at Birkbeck as well as internationally renowned scholars, artists and curators, who advise the Director, Steering Committee and members of the Centre on strategic priorities.
Steering Committee
Dr Luciana Martins (CILAVS director, 2007-2010, 2011-to the present) is Senior Lecturer in Luso-Brazilian Cultural Geography and Visual Culture. She has published on the visual culture of tropicality, geographical thought, world cities and modernity. Her current research focuses on modernity, photography and documentary film of Brazil in the early twentieth century; and on Andean textiles.
Dr Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez is Senior Lecturer in Modern Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies. Her interests are in the study of cultural politics and in the relationships between aesthetics, politics and ideologies, more specifically on questions of modernity/postmodernity, ideologies of history, the role of leftist intellectuals, exile and utopia in literature, film and urban spaces.
Dr Zoltán Biedermann lectures in Iberian Empires, Early Modern Portugal and Spain. He works on Portuguese and Spanish imperial history with a focus on early modern Asia. He is interested in the cultural foundations of political action, including ideas of conquest, Utopianism and the representation of space.
Dr Carmen Fracchia (CILAVS director, 2010-2011) is specialist in Spanish Art History and Visual Culture. Her major research areas are the visual representation of 'minorities'; race, religion, and the interface between art and the history of science. She is currently working on a research project centred on the visual representation of slave subjectivity in Imperial Spain.
Dr Jessamy Harvey lectures in Childhood Culture in Modern Spain. She has published on the representation of childhood in Spanish film and popular visual forms such as comics and schoolbooks, and is currently working on internet religiosity.
Dr John Kraniauskas is Reader in Latin American Cultural History, Film and Politics. Particularly interested in relations between state and cultural forms, he is currently working on transcultural and subaltern studies; crime form and the state in Mexico; and Eva Perón and the populist state.
Dr Luís Trindade is Senior Lecturer in Modern Portuguese Studies. His research focuses particularly on the relation between literature and the culture industries in the context of authoritarian politics and fascist ideology. He has also undertaken research on the 1974-75 revolutionary period in Portugal.