Professor Jesusa Vega teaches at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. As Honorary Research Fellow in the Birkbeck School of Arts (ILAS Department), she is developing her research project entitled English satirical print, the Peninsular War and the new image of Spain, which focuses on the imaginative geography of Spain in nineteenth century satirical prints by English artists in the wake of the Napoleonic wars. Prof Vega has been Fellow of the Department de Art History & Theory, University of Essex (UK); Director & Manager of Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, Madrid (Spain); Visiting Professor, Indianapolis Museum of Art (USA); King Juan Carlos I of Spain in Spanish Culture, New York University (USA); and Editor of Goya Revista de Arte. Her main publications include Ciencia, arte e ilusión en la España Ilustrada (Madrid: CSIC-Polifemo, 2010), and Construir la identidad. Vestir la apariencia. La cuestión del traje en la España del siglo XVIII (with A. Molina, Madrid: Ayuntamiento de Madrid, 2005). For more details visit https://sites.google.com/site/jesusavegaglz/home.
Cristiana Bertazoni is a founder member and researcher at the Centro de Estudos Mesoamericanos e Andinos (CEMA/USP) and since June 2012 is a Research Fellow at the Centro de Estudos Ameríndios (Cesta) both at the University of São Paulo. Her main research interest is on Pre-Columbian and Colonial Andean History, with special focus on the ways of interaction that the Inca Empire developed with the indigenous groups of Western Amazonia. She holds a PhD from the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex where she has worked as a curatorial advisor for the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art and also as one of the editors for the academic electronic journal Arara (Art and Architecture of the Americas). Cristiana is currently working on the publication of her PhD thesis entitled 'Antisuyu: An Investigation of Inca Attitudes to their Western Amazonian Territories'.
Dr Isaac Marrero Guillamón is a postdoctoral fellow associated to CILAVS and Dr Mari Paz Balibrea. He has been awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science from January 2011 for one year (extendable to two years) to work on the project 'Looking at/for the militant city: political space and audiovisual art in two postindustrial, Olympic cities – the case of Barcelona and London'. You can find out more at the Militant City website.
Esther Gabara, Associate Professor of Romance Studies, and Art, Art History & Visual Studies at Duke University, is visiting CILAVS in 2009-2010 to develop her book-length project entitled Non-Literary Fiction: Invention and Interventions in Contemporary American Visual Culture. The broad aim of the project is to understand how visual fictions operate as strategies of in(ter)vention in contemporary political struggles, a period defined by the global expansion of neoliberalism from the dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s to the present. Prof Gabara is the author of Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico and Brazil (Duke, 2008).
Dr Carreño is Visiting Researcher at CILAVS (November-December 2009), developing his research on Western images of the indigenous peoples of Patagonia. He lectures anthropology at the Universidad Academia de Humanismo Cristiano in Chile, where he coordinates the Núcleo de Antropología Visual. Editor of the Revista Chilena de Antropología Visual, Dr Carreño has also participated in numerous documentaries on cultural identity in Chile and on whale hunting.
Professor Arnold is Honorary Research Professor of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Culture and Visiting Scholar to the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. She holds postgraduate degrees in Architecture and in Environmental Studies, and a doctorate in Anthropology from UCL (1988); she has been a Leverhulme Research Fellow and ERSC Senior Research Fellow in England. She teaches at the Universidad PIEB in La Paz, Bolivia, as well as in the doctoral programme in Anthropology-Archaeology at the University of Tarapaca, in Arica, Chile, and in Andean Studies at the Instituto Rio Branco in Brasilia. She is directing a Summer School for the University of California, San Diego, in La Paz this year. She is Director of the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara in Bolivia. She was winner of the national competition for the Project ‘Processes of Construction of Political identities in the Altiplano region, Bolivia’, UNIR Foundation, La Paz. Among her recent publications are 'The Nature of Indigenous Literatures in the Andes' in Vol. III of Latin American Literatures: a Comparative History of Cultural Formations (Eds. Valdés and Kadir, OUP, 2004); The Metamorphosis of Heads: Textual Struggles, Education and Land in the Andes (Pittsburgh University Press, 2006); Hilos sueltos. Los Andes desde el textil (La Paz: Plural, 2007) and Heads of state. Icons of power and politics in the ancient and modern Andes (Berkeley: Leftcoast Press, 2007).
Dr Rego is Associate Research Fellow to Birkbeck, University of London (June-December 2007) developing his postdoctoral research project entitled ‘An English enterprise: Brazil Plantation Syndicate Ltd and the making of new cities’, funded by the Brazilian Council CAPES. He lectures on architecture and urban history at Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil, and specialises in 20th century architecture with particular interest in Brazilian modernist buildings. After a PhD on the process of transforming European modernist ideas into Brazilian architecture he now focuses on the influence of British town-and-country planning ideas on a pioneer colonisation settlement. His current research deals with a British land development scheme in Brazil between the years 1924-1944, which was responsible for the construction of a railway and the foundation of a dozen new towns.
Dr Ruido is Visiting Researcher at Birkbeck College (February-June 2008). She is a Lecturer in Video Art, Documentary Films & Feminist Film Theory at the Universitat de Barcelona and also a filmmaker and cultural producer. Since 1995 she has worked on interdisciplinary media projects, whose conceptual reference frame has been built around issues concerning the social construction of the body and identity, and its position within different conceptualisations of labour. More recently, her work has explored the different mechanisms that contribute to the construction of memory and the relation of the latter to different historical narratives. The following documentary essays are some of the most important among her audiovisual work: 'La memoria interior' (2002), 'Tiempo real' (2003) and 'Ficciones anfibias' (2005). The video-installation 'La escena del crimen', which was shown at the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporaneo (CGAC) in Santiago de Compostela in November 2007, is part of her current project 'Plan Rosebud' (produced by the CGAC).
She has published several articles and books including Ana Mendieta (Gipúzkoa: Nerea, 2002); 'La máquina retórica. Construcciones de género, asimilaciones y resistencias en la cinematografía española y argentina de los años 40 y 50' in S. Aznar and D. Wechsler (eds), La Memoria Compartida (Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2005); U. Permui and M. Ruido (eds), Corpos de Producción: Miradas Críticas e relatos Feministas en Torno aos Suxietos Sexuados nos Espacios Públicos (Santiago de Compostela, 2005).