Staff research interests
| Area of expertise | Academic |
| Iberian empires, early Modern Portugal and Spain, and Native American cultures |
Dr Zoltan Biedermann: 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: a specialist in Spanish and Italian art history, with particular interest in relations between the Spanish visual production of the Early Modern period and the Spanish Empire, but with further interests in colonial art and Goya; and the interface between visual culture, religion and the history of science. Laura León-Llerena: colonial Latin America studies, Andean history and literature, Quechua language, translation studies, postcolonial studies, cultural anthropology, religion studies, ethnography of writing. |
| Latin American visual culture, film, literature, and politics |
Professor Jens Andermann: areas of interest are in cultural and literary theory, history, and politics, in particular in Argentina, Brazil and the Southern Cone. Current research focuses on modernity and the crisis of the landscape, and on the real in Argentine and Brazilian cinema since the mid-1990s. Dr John Kraniauskas: Dr John Kraniauskas is a specialist in Latin American literary and cultural studies, with particular interest in relations between the state and cultural forms. Dr Luciana Martins is a specialist in Brazilian visual and material culture, cultural history and the history and philosophy of geography, with particular emphasis on visuality and travel. Cecilia Palmeiro: contemporary literature and its relations with politics, writing practices in contemporary Argentina and Brazil, semiology, literary theory and cultural studies. Professor William Rowe is the author of eight books on Latin American literature and culture, including Juan Rulfo: El llano en llamas (London, Grant & Cutler Critical Guides, 1987), Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in Latin America [with Vivian Schelling] (London, Verso, 1991), Ensayos arguedianos (Lima, Sur and Universidad de San Marcos, 1996), and Hacia una poética radical: ensayos de hermenéutica cultural (Rosario and Lima, Beatriz Viterbo and Mosca Azul, 1996). Antonio da Silva: Brazilian gender and cultural studies, feminism, psychoanalysis, colonialism/ postcolonialism, and Queer: gay/lesbian studies, mainly in contemporary cinema, television and literature. |
| Modern Portuguese studies |
Luis Trindade is a specialist in Modern Portuguese culture, with particular interest in the relations between literature and the cultural industries in the context of authoritarian politics and fascist ideology. |
| Modern Spanish cultural studies |
Dr Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez: her research focuses on the periods of Francoism and Republican exile and of post-Franco Spain. Her interests are in the study of cultural politics and in the relationships between aesthetics, politics and ideologies, specifically with regards to questions of modernity/postmodernity, ideologies of history, the role of leftist intellectuals, exile and diaspora in literature, culture and urban spaces. Dr Carmen Fracchia: a specialist in Early Modern Spanish and Italian art history; also teaches courses in modern Spanish art. Dr Jessamy Harvey specialises in the study of childhood culture in modern Spain; her PhD analysed the construction of Spanish girlhood during the early Franco period with an interdisciplinary cultural studies approach. |
| Spanish language and linguistics | Dr Maria Elena Placencia is a specialist in linguistics, with main research interests in socio- and variational pragmatics as well as cross-cultural communica |
