People

His research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, power and language in the context of Native South American socialities. His doctoral thesis examined the Mapuche of southern Chile and he is the author of the book Becoming Mapuche: Person and Ritual in Indigenous Chile.

He currently supervises three Chilean PhD students, all of whom are fully funded by Chilean state scholarships. Dr Course collaborates with Chile's two largest universities, Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica, and is the international evaluator for the latter. He has also collaborated extensively with anthropologists in Brazil and spent his 2011 sabbatical affiliated to the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

He is currently developing a major grant proposal for the FAPESP-RCUK (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo) awards, with his colleague Pedro Cesarino at the Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo.

Casey High’s research focuses on violence, history and indigenous political movements in Latin America. His ongoing fieldwork combines ethnographic and historical perspectives on violence and the transformation of inter-ethnic relations in the Ecuadorian Amazon. His research interests also include language, indigenous rights and the interface between cosmology and development.

His forthcoming monograph, based on fieldwork in Waorani communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, relates indigenous forms of memory to representations of Amazonian violence in colonial history, missionary texts and contemporary cinema. He is also co-editor of two books on contemporary anthropological theory and practice. These include How Do We Know? Evidence, ethnography, and the making of anthropological knowledge (2008) and The Anthropology of Ignorance: Ethnographic Perspectives (2012).

Before joining Edinburgh he was a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS in Paris, and a lecturer in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is currently involved in a collaborative project to document the Waorani language.

Maya Mayblin is a senior lecturer in Social Anthropology. For the past 20 years she has carried out research in Northeast Brazil, largely among rural and semi-rural communities in the interior of the State of Pernambuco. She is the author of numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals, the monograph Gender, Catholicism, and Morality in Brazil: virtuous Husbands, powerful wives (2010, Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editer with Norget and Napolitano of The Anthropology of Catholicism: a reader (University of California Press, 2017). Her research spans politics, gender, ritual, and religion and her writing often explores the existential tensions and implications of Christian practice for Brazilian forms of citizenship and political action. She is currently completing a second monograph that deals with the history of Catholic priest involvement in local party politics.

Francisco’s research focuses on two areas: carbon accounting and the implications of carbon market design for private sector investment. Issues of particular interest include the development of new market mechanisms (and accounting methods) in sectors such as reduced deforestation (REDD/REDD+), biochar and carbon capture and storage (CCS), and related matters such as carbon risk management and regulation.

He has worked extensively on the Brazilian financial system in comparison to Lebanon and Turkey in 2011 & 2012.

An expert in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Dr Gregson's is active in a number of international research and commercialisation initiatives in the European Union, Colombia, Uganda and Sri Lanka and actively present at international conferences and workshops to academics, practioners and policy-makers. He has experience as business consultant and analyst assisting new technology-based companies in securing investment, market analysis, team building, business strategy, etc. Columbia is one of his main interests, and he has worked and is working on a series of academic projects with Colombian universities. His book Financing New Ventures: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Angel Investment Business (2014) centres on entrepreneurial finance in Colombia.

Dr Hopewell’s research focuses on global political economy, globalization, trade and development. Her current research analyzes the rise of new powers from the developing world - such as Brazil, India and China - who are challenging the longstanding dominance of the US and other advanced-industrialized states in the global economy and its governing institutions. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia, a post-doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Germany, and completed her PhD at the University of Michigan.

Professor Aspinwall is an expert on rule of law/corruption in Mexico. His latest book Side effects: Mexican governance under NAFTA’s labor and environmental agreements (Stanford UP, 2012) examines how Mexico is evolving, as changes take place in domestic politics, and outside influences (primarily from NAFTA) are increasingly being felt in Mexican society.

Professor Michelon is an expert on Brazilian private law. His is the author of a book on the Brazilian Law of unjustified enrichment (Direito Restituitório, RT, 2006) and of many articles covering a range of subjects within Brazilian Private Law. Professor Michelon is also engaged in collaboration with Brazilian legal theorists, in particular at the Universities of São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, as well as the Getúlio Vargas Foundation.

Professor Williams is an expert on twentieth-century urbanisation in Brazil, particularly the development of Brasilia. His publications include the book Brazil: Modern Architectures in History.

Gas-separation process on offshore gas-exploration platforms. In collaboration with University of Fortaleza (Brazil) and University of Malaga (Spain).

Dr Julie Cupples has published extensively on Nicaraguan cultural politics, covering questions of development/postdevelopment; geographies of neoliberalism, gender and sexuality; disasters and environmental risk; municipal governance; elections and indigenous media. She is the author of Latin American Development (Routledge, 2013) and is the co-PI on a Marsden-funded grant Geographies of Media Convergence that involves research with community mediamakers on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast.

Iona is currently working on the circulation of Scottish Enlightenment texts in independence-era South America.

Iona's broad research interests lie in the writing, history, and culture of nineteenth century Spanish America and Brazil. She works primarily on Spanish American independence, Argentina, history of the book, gender studies, and transatlantic relations.

Marisa's research relates large-scale projects to improve food systems in Latin America and the Caribbean to localized experiences, understandings and practices of food production, exchange and consumption. She completed her doctorate in social anthropology in 2009 (Oxon), and is presently exploring crossovers between social anthropology and human geography. Her principal research interests lie in political economic, moral and cultural ideas of food, ethical consumption, and social justice at local, national and global scales, especially in regards to the uneven historical development of globalisation. Her doctorate was a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the 1990s' shift in food provisioning practices in Cuba. She has recently published an ethnographic monograph on this theme, entitled Everyday Moral Economies: Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba (2014), which draws from work in economic anthropology as well as human geography. Marisa is currently commencing a broad research project comparing food networks, consumer values and nutrition transition in Cuba, Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago (and, eventually, their former colonizers, Spain and the United Kingdom) and continuing to explore crossovers in geography and anthropology.

Dr Fiona Mackintosh is a Senior Lecturer in Latin American Literature and currently Programme Director of the MSc in Comparative Literature at Edinburgh. Her research interests lie in 20th century and contemporary Argentinian fiction and poetry, and in literary translation. She holds an MA Hons from the University of Cambridge in Music and Modern Languages, an MPhil from the University of Oxford in Modern Languages, and a PhD from the University of Warwick in Comparative Literature. Recent and forthcoming publications include book chapters on Silvina Ocampo (2012, 2016), and articles on Guillermo Martínez (2017), Alicia Kozameh and Claudia Piñeiro.

Dr Charlotte Gleghorn holds a Chancellor’s Fellowship. Her research interests lie in the field of Latin American film studies, with a particular emphasis on the political work of cinema and its relationship to processes of memory. Her doctoral thesis, awarded from the University of Liverpool in 2009, focussed on contemporary Argentine and Brazilian women’s film production, and in 2005 she completed an MA in World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. Prior to joining Edinburgh, she worked for four years as Postdoctoral Researcher on the ‘Indigeneity in the Contemporary World: Performance, Politics, Belonging’ project, hosted at Royal Holloway, University of London and funded by the European Research Council. Her current research explores the configurations of authorship, authority and cultural memory in relation to Indigenous film and video production in Latin America. Recent publications include chapters in Latin American Cinemas: Local Views and Transnational Connections (2010) and New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema (2012), and articles in Interventions (2013) and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2013).

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Dr Raquel Ribeiro took a BA in Journalism and Communication Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in Portugal, followed by a PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool. She was the first recipient in the Humanities of the Nottingham Advanced Research Fellowship (2010-2012), at the University of Nottingham, where she developed the postdoctoral project: “War Wounds: Cultural representations of the Cuban presence in the Angolan civil war”. She is a member of the Cuba Research Forum, in the University of Nottingham. She taught Brazilian Literature at the University of Oxford before joining the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Edinburgh in 2014. Raquel’s main areas of research are in Lusophone literatures and cultures, and Trans-Atlantic intellectual and cultural exchanges between Lusophone countries and Latin America, and Comparative Literature. She is currently preparing a monograph on Cuban literature and film of the Angolan war.

Carlos’ scholarly interests reside at the intersection of Linguistics and the Sociology of language.  His research lie in the field of Sociolinguistics, Dialectology, Language Contact and Second Language Pedagogy. His research itinerary in Hispanic Linguistics examines the ways in which Spanish grammar varies among different Latin American regions, its particularities, connections and contacts with other languages from the Americas, like Quechua. Prior to joining The University of Edinburgh, Carlos worked for several years at the Instituto Cervantes where he was in charge of the development of numerous academic projects in collaboration with different Mexican universities (Universidad de Guadalajara, Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey, Universidad de Colima, etc.).

Dr Parra Rodríguez is a joint researcher on Alzheimer’s Disease with Professor Francisco Lopera, director of the Neuroscience Group of the University of Antioquia, Colombia.

Professor Erik Camayd-Freixas is Professor of Hispanic Studies, Graduate Program Director, and Director of Translation Studies at Florida International University. A Harvard-trained communications analyst, social theorist, and expert linguist at federal and state courts, Professor Camayd has testified before Congress, contributed as amicus curiae to the U.S. Supreme Court, and received human rights awards from the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, the Guatemalan Foreign Ministry, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. He has interpreted for ten heads of state, including President Obama and Pope Benedict XVI. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Latin American culture and literature.

Professor Gustavo Vega-Cánovas holds a PhD in Political Science from Yale University and a Law degree from the National University of Mexico. He is a professor in the Center for International Studies at El Colegio de Mexico of which he was also the Head during 2005 and 2011. He specializes in US bilateral Relations and North American integration. He has taught at Brown, the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE), Duke, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Texas at Austin, and Yale. His research over the last 15 years focuses on North American integration, the most recent product of which was the book titled The North American Free Trade Agreement: a Historical Perspective and Challenges for the future (2010). He is the author of more than 40 articles, and co-author of 5 more books on North American issues. He has been a recipient of multiple awards like the Woodrow Wilson Public Policy Fellowship, the Fulbright Scholarship, the MacArthur fellowship, the Inter-American Foundation fellowship, the Yale Fellowship, and the Colegio de Mexico Fellowship. He is a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) of the Education Ministry of Mexico.

Magda Sepúlveda is Associate Professor in the Facultad de Letras of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. An expert in Chilean literature and Cultural Studies, she has authored the books Ciudad quiltra. Poesía chilena (1973-2013) (2013), Chile urbano: la ciudad en la literatura y el cine (2013) and co-authored Tinta de sangre: narrativa policial chilena del siglo XX  (2009). She has been the principal investigator of the projects "Representaciones de la ciudad en la poesía chilena" and "Comidas y bebidas en la poesía chilena", both funded by research councils, which analyse and construe Chilean poetry in the context of Chile's political history, urban development, indigenous cultures and film. She has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Salamanca, visiting researcher at the University of Leipzig, and has organised and delivered workshops at the Catholic University of Milan and Stockholm University. She is the Director of the Postgraduate Programme in Literature at the PUC Chile.

Dr Cowling works mainly on nineteenth-century slavery and abolition in Brazil and Cuba. She is the author of Conceiving Freedom: Women of Colour, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro (University of North Carolina Press, 2013). She is working on a second book project entitled Across the Miles: Law, Geography and Human Movement in Nineteenth-Century Slave Societies (Brazil and Cuba).

Dr Charlotte Matthews was a lecturer in Portuguese at the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures until 2014.