Science and Engineering at The University of Edinburgh

Caribbean and Latin American Research at Edinburgh (CLARE)

MEMBERS

Maria is a researcher at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. She has led two 4-month long expeditions to Belize and the Peruvian Amazon. Her work focuses on floristics and phytogeography.

Cristobal Bonelli is a Psychologist, Psychotherapist and a current doctoral student in Medical Anthropology. His research is concerned with the relations between indigenous healing practices and biomedical knowledge in Southern Chile. His particular research interests are focused on notions of the body, patients’ experiences, and medicines, in the context of multiple ontologies.

Magnus Course’s research is concerned with the relations between kinship, personhood, power and language in the context of Native South American socialities. He completed his PhD on kinship and personhood among the Mapuche of southern Chile at the London School of Economics in 2005, and the ensuing monograph is to be published as Mapuche Ñi Mongen: Individuo y sociedad en el sur de Chile in March 2008. He is currently working on a British Academy-funded project entitled ‘The Changing Value of Linguistic Forms among the Mapuche of Southern Chile’ which seeks to combine insights from both social and linguistic anthropology in the analysis of Mapuche sociality.

My research draws upon insights from postcolonial theory to consider the continuing political status of Puerto Rico as a dependent 'non-incorporated territory' of the United States. Specifically, I explore within a postcolonial frame the social, political, economic and cultural factors that have influenced Puerto Ricans to voice overwhelming support for continued association with the United States in four countrywide plebiscites since 1952, the founding year of the island's present constitution. I understand this seeming eschewal of political independence in terms of three progressive concepts of postcolonial scholarship - 'hybridisation', 'creolisation' and 'postnationalism' - and contend that the limited impact of movements and activism for independence on Puerto Rico may be a testament to the extraordinary complexity of a postcolonial society.

Katherine’s research interests focus on the Quaternary climate changes of South America and involve the reconstruction of precipitation history for a site in Bolivia.

Peter is Professor Emeritus within the School of GeosSciences. His research interests concentrate on: tropical biogeography; tropical soils and land development; savanna and forest ecology in the New World tropics. Monitoring forest degradation and forest management. Remote sensing and GIS applications in tropical biogeography. Current projects relating to the Americas include: Soil micro-variation and tropical forest growth (supported by Natural History Museum) and paleo-environmental change in tropical lowlands, Belize (supported by Leverhulme Trust).

David Howard has research interests in contemporary social and urban geographies of the Caribbean and Latin America. His specific interests focus on the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, and on the theoretical links between urban policing, territory, violence and racial discrimination. In the Scottish context, he has two subsidiary research interests: firstly, the impact of current anti-racism and multicultural policies; and secondly, Scottish transatlantic connections with Jamaica and the historical role of the port of Leith as a point of passage. He is currently a CNRS Associate at the Centre d’Étude d’Afrique Noire, Université de Bordeaux IV; co-ordinating editor for the Bulletin of Latin American Research , and Chair of the Society for Caribbean Studies.

Innes M. Keighren is Research Associate for "Correspondence: exploration and travel from manuscript to print, 1768-1848" -- a two-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Organized between the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Geography and Centre for the History of the Book, the project is concerned with the epistolary practices which linked travel writers to their publishers, and with the epistemic translations which permitted knowledge in the field to become knowledge on the page. Innes has particular research interests in nineteenth-century British travellers to South America, and with the ways in which that continent was represented in travel narratives published by the London firm John Murray.

Iona Macintyre is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. She works on nineteenth-century Latin American literature, history and culture

Fiona J. Mackintosh is a lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh, within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. Her main area of research is 20th-century Latin American Literature, with particular interests in Argentinian literature and in women's writing. She has published on Silvina Ocampo and Alejandra Pizarnik.

Elize Massard da Fonseca is a doctoral student in social policy. She comes from Brazil where she worked as a research assistant at the Center for Information on Science and Technology/Ministry of Health in Brazil from 2001-2006. She worked as a research assistant at the Department of Political Science / Michigan State University (United States) in 2006; as a research assistant in the School of Public Health / University of Michigan (United States) from 2006-2007; and is currently a technical consultant with the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Her academic and research interests are in health politics, pharmaceutical policy, and qualitative and quantitative research methods. She has published a number of articles on these topics.

Maya is a lecturer in the department of Social Anthropology. Her regional expertise is Brazil, and her current research interests include the anthropology of Christianity, concepts of power and sacrifice, gender, and medical anthropology. Before coming to Edinburgh, she worked at the London School of Economics and King’s College London. Her monograph with Palgrave Macmillan, Catholicism, Gender and Morality in Brazil: Virtuous Husbands, Powerful Wives , explores the intersections of conjugality, suffering and popular Catholicism in Northeast Brazil.

Frank Mayle has focused much of his research in Bolivia, analysing the Quaternary palaeoecology of the humid tropics.

Patrick has undertaken research in the Amazon, focusing on ecosystem science; the carbon-water relationship of plants and ecosystems; the terrestrial carbon cycle and tropical forestry.

Betsy is a lecturer in Human Geography with research interests in religion, youth and development. Her work in Latin America has concentrated on evangelical movements in Peru.

Carolina Orloff is a PhD student in Hispanic Studies, within the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures. The main focus of her research is the evolution of the representation of the political element throughout Julio Cortázar's longer fiction. She is interested in Argentinian literature of the 20th Century, especially in relation to politics. She has published on Cortázar and on translation theory. Carolina is also a part-time tutor of Latin American and Spanish literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Toby is Head of the Tropical Diversity section at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh whose taxonomic, biogeographical and environmental research has focuses on South America, in particular Peru.

Neil Stuart’s research in Belize uses GIS supported methods to solve practical problems of land and water resource management. His work concentrates on GIS applications for developing nations.

Kinga Tomczyk has studied Social Anthropology and Philosophy. She has undertaken research in Peru, focusing on Quechua communities and their relations with ‘western civilization’. She is currently working with Elisabeth Olson on evangelical movements in Peru during the early twentieth century, and is a member of the Nicaragua Learning Exchange based in Edinburgh.

I have been scholarly formed and professionally trained as a sociologist in Chile, where I started focusing my interests on the interplay between political, social and urban theory and the democratic and urban changes affecting the country. I carried out my PhD at the European University Institute in Florence, a comparative study of the uses people give to public spaces in the capital cities of Madrid and Santiago, taking public spaces to be the scenarios from where one can observe the social underpinnings of democratic transformations in both countries. At the moment, I am undertaking post-doctoral research in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh about the prevalence of concrete walls in shaping the urban fabric, and the way in which they keep on structuring the dynamics of urban integration/segregation in contemporary Europe.

Karin is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Remote Sensing for Forestry, with research interests in Belize.

Richard Williams   rwilliam@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

Karina Williamson   karina.williamson@ed.ac.uk

Thérèse Yarde     T.N.Yarde@sms.ed.ac.uk

Thérèse is a postgraduate researcher in the Human Geography Research Group studying aspects of environmental identity and concepts of nature in the context of the tourist economies of Dominica and Barbados.

Tony Furlong     a.b.furlong@sms.ed.ac.uk

Ryan Gladwin     r.r.gladwin@sms.ed.ac.uk

Iris Marchand     i.marchand@sms.ed.ac.uk

VISITORS

Carlos de la Espriella     carlos@hdm.lth.se

Mélanie Gidel     melanie.gidel@u-paris10.fr

Rachel Douglas   Rachel.Douglas@liverpool.ac.uk

Rachel is Lecturer in Francophone Postcolonial Studies at the University of Liverpool, and visiting academic at Edinburgh. Her monograph Frankétienne and Rewriting: A Work in Progress will be published in 2009, and she has published widely on Francophone Caribbean literature, in particular that of Haiti. At the moment, she is working on a substantial critical text on C.L.R. James’s rewriting of The Black Jacobins in both play- and history-form, underlining the text’s mobile and organic transformations. Related to this, her longer-term project is a monograph focusing on issues of rewriting in Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean literature, examining the near-obsessive degree of rewriting to which Caribbean rewriters have subjected their own literary texts and essays—a phenomenon frequently overlooked in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature, which has tended to use the term ‘rewriting’ in the loose sense of revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as ‘rewriting history’ and ‘rewriting canonical texts’. This comparative monograph on Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean rewriting will focus on the most prolific Caribbean rewriters: Kamau Brathwaite, C.L.R. James, Derek Walcott, Dany Laferrière, Gérard Étienne, Aimé Césaire, and Frankétienne. It will outline the key place in Caribbean writing of what we might call a postcolonial history of the book, arguing for the central importance of the genesis and publishing history in the formation of the best-known Caribbean texts.

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