Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Newcastle University
The Centre is based in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, but has members in the Faculty of Medical Sciences and in the Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering as well, and is keen to develop connections with colleagues in all areas. In this newsletter you can read reports on some of our members’ ongoing research projects in many parts of the region, from Barbados to Argentina and Chile. Latin America and the Caribbean have long been studied at Newcastle, since the period when we were still Armstrong College and then King’s College of Durham University. Spanish has been taught within modern languages since 1923, and Portuguese since 1965. A degree in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies has been taught at the University since the 1960s, and before the School of Modern Languages existed, the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies was the first Department in Britain with ‘Latin American Studies’ in its name.
In my own discipline, history, William Laurence Burn was a Professor between 1944 and 1966. He was a very traditional historian of Britain and the British Empire and would hardly have considered himself a Caribbeanist. Nevertheless when I began my PhD research on the end of slavery in Jamaica, I still turned to his book Emancipation and Apprenticeship in the British West Indies, published in 1937. We have a strong tradition of interest in Latin America and the Caribbean here.
In the more recent past the Centre grows out of the Americas Research Group. The Research Group was founded in 2003 by several colleagues, in what was then the newly established Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. The group provided a space for people across the faculty working on all parts of the region to get to know each other and work together. It hosted a seminar series, many workshops and conferences, and an annual postgraduate conference. In fact, we were doing so much as a ‘Research Group’ that it was time to become a Centre.
The Centre established four research themes on which we intend to focus our attention. They are the reproduction and contestation of power; cultural production, language, heritage and identity; mobility, livelihood, and everyday life; and resources, sustainability and health. Further information about how we define these themes can be found on our website at www.ncl.ac.uk/clacs/research
The first theme in particular was taken up at one of the highlights of the year, our launch in June, at which Professor Jean Franco of Columbia University delivered a lecture on ‘Gore Capitalism and the Undoing of the Mexican Post-Revolutionary State and its Culture’. The lecture also served as the keynote address at the conference on Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal, organized by Patricia Oliart and Jorge Catalá-Carrasco and other colleagues involved in the project of the same name.
This year sees some new initiatives from CLACS, including the establishment of the Vanessa Knights Memorial Lecture. The first lecture in what we intend to become an annual event, will be delivered by Professor David Treece of Kings College London in November.
We look forward with excitement to the new academic year and welcome both new and returning colleagues and students.
Diana Paton
Director
CLACS
