Leverhulme Visiting Professorship brings Professor Jerome Branche to Birkbeck
Scheme provides for outstandingly distinguished academics, based in overseas universities, to contribute to the knowledge and skills of the host institution and to gain from the cross-exchange with faculty and students.
The Department of Languages, Cultures and Applied Linguistics (LCAL) at Birkbeck has been awarded a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship to invite Professor Jerome Branche to join the team for eight months from 1 June 2022. He is Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.
Professor Branche is renowned internationally for his pioneering work on race, colonialism, and literature in the Latin American, Caribbean and the Luso-Hispanic worlds.
On Wednesday 8 June, Professor Branche launches a five-part masterclass series, with weekly units covering several interlocking topics including race, coloniality, the politics of memory, forced labour, liberation, and national identity in the context of the African diaspora as it relates mainly to the Hispanic Caribbean. Its primary texts, which consist of a documentary, autobiographies, a film, poetry, a novel, colonial edicts and other documents, all speak to the question of racialized being, and the representation of history.
“I'm looking forward with more than a little excitement to the exchanges with Birkbeck students and staff, and with the planned audiences with whom I will share my research,” said Professor Branche. “I am sure that it will be a rich and rewarding experience, and that I will gain immensely from their responses and feedback.”
His work is distinctive in its interdisciplinary breadth, geographical reach, and historical range, encompassing Luso-Hispanic cultures across the Atlantic from colonial times to the present.
Through the planned programme of lectures, staff and student seminars, a public discussion with leading academic and artist Marcus Wood, module teaching and assistance in building the ‘Expanding the Latin American Colonial Archive: Transatlantic, Trans Hispanic and Transpacific Connections’ research network, Professor Branche will share insights from his extraordinary combination of specialisms to scholars and students. In addition, his staff workshop will discuss ways of decolonising the curriculum.
Leverhulme Visiting Professorships provide for UK institutions to invite an eminent researcher from overseas to enhance the skills and knowledge of the academic staff and/or students for a duration of between three and twelve months.
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