School of Advanced Study, University of London

Post-Doc, Institute for the Study of the Americas

Other Affiliations: The University of Manchester, History

Postdoctoral Fellow: Liberalism in the Americas

Thesis Title: Alcohol and Nation-Building in 19th Century Mexican Fiction

About

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Latin American History, working on the research facilitation project "Liberalism in the Americas" at the Institute for the Study of the Americas, London. I'm building an international research network of scholars interested in this project through a series of public lectures, research workshops, publications, and an online research community. The project is also working towards a digital library of resources for the study of liberalism in the Americas, with the aim of promoting comparative, transnational and collaborative research into questions of political culture, economic policy, intellectual debates, social development, and international relations. In the current phase of the project, the library will focus resources on the cases of Mexico, Peru and Argentina, c1780-1930, and this will expand in subsequent phases to other geographical and chronological areas.

Another key area of comparative history that interests me is that of drinking, drunkenness and alcoholism, which fuelled my role in the establishment of the Warwick Drinking Studies Network, an interdisciplinary research group based at the University of Warwick that brings together scholars who work on any aspect of drink and drinking culture.

I completed my PhD in the History Department at the University of Warwick in December 2009. My doctoral research explored 19th century nation-building discourses in Mexico, with a particular focus on how ideas and practices involving alcohol shaped these discourses. I examined a wide range of novels, alongside newspapers, medical texts, and judicial records, to map the social geography of drinking places, to investigate the gendered representation of different drinking behaviours, to explore the relationship between ideas about drunkenness, patriotism and citizenship, and to trace the development of the medical and psychiatric concept of alcoholism.

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