In Conversation: PhD researchers at Warwick

For this special session, three Warwick PhD students will talk about their research and we'll think about how it sheds new light on many of the "themes and problems" we have studied throughout this course. We're delighted to introduce Carla Andrés Bauzá, Eloisa Ocando Thomas, and Lewis Twiby.

Before the session, please have a look at a couple of the short pieces we will circulate and come along with a couple of questions to ask the speakers. These can be about any aspects of their work, or more general ones about their recent lived experiences researching in the countries they work on, for example.

We will discuss the readings in our last seminars in week 3.

Core reading:

Carla Andres Bauzá, "Mobilisations of African and Afro-Descendant Women in the Insurrections of Saint-Domingue and Cuba," Revue d'histoire du XIX siècle, 2023.

Lewis Twiby, "Left-Wing and the 'Other' History: The El Paso Bath Riots, 1917.

Ana Otero Cleves, "Foreign Machetes and Cheap Cotton Cloth: Popular Consumers and Imported Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Colombia," Hispanic American Historical Review, 27:3 (August 2017) [useful for key conceptual context to Eloisa's project on the history of consumption in Latin America - or, if you read Spanish, read Eloisa's piece below instead!]

Further reading:

Eloisa Ocando Thomas, "El comercio menor y las pulperias en Caracas durante la segunda mitad del s. XVIII," Nuestro Sur (Caracas, Venezuela), 10:15 (Jan-Jun 2019): 59-82

Oscar Martinez, Ciudad Juarez: Saga of a Legendary Border City, (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2018), esp. chapters 4 and 5 [useful context on Lewis's work]

Seminar questions:

What questions is the researcher trying to answer?

Why do you think they chose this topic?

What sources are they using to answer their questions?

What challenges - practical, methodological etc - have they encountered?

What new contribution to their field are they making?

How does the reading relate to the 'themes and problems' we've talked about on this course?

Imagine you were starting a PhD project on Latin American history. What topic might you choose to find out more about and why?

CC class slide