About

Dr Michela Coletta is Associate Professor in Hispanic Studies. Michela received her PhD in Latin American History from University College London. She has previously taught at King's College London, University College London and at the University of Bristol. She has also held a Marie Curie Early Career Fellowship at the Universidad 'Pablo de Olavide' in Seville, Spain, a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of London, and an Associate Research Fellowship at UCL Institute of the Americas.

Michela works at the intersection of cultural history and the environmental humanities with a transnational and interdisciplinary focus. She has produced both single-authored and collaborative works in areas including nation-building in the Southern Cone, Latin American decolonial thought, indigenous and environmental politics, eco-social knowledge, and the role of indigeneity in environmental governance with a focus on Bolivia.

Her monograph Decadent Modernity: Civilisation and Latinidad in Spanish America, 1880-1920, published by LUP in 2018 (paperback 2021), brings to light the social and political significance of cultural modernity by looking at transatlantic flows of people and ideas at the turn of the nineteenth century with a transnational focus on Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. She has co-edited the open access volume Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (ILAS Book Series, 2016), which brings intellectual, cultural and literary history into conversation with social sciences perspectives on environmental debates.

Michela is the recipient of an EU Horizon 2020 individual grant to write a cultural environmental history of Buen Vivir with a focus on Andean and Amazonian epistemologies at FUB Berlin, 2022-2024.

Select Publications

Monograph

Decadent Modernity: Civilization and Latinidad in Spanish America, 1880-1920 (LUP, 2018; paperback 2021).

Edited volumes

Race and Geography in Latin American History, special section co-edited with Andrea Cadelo. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 38:2 (April 2019), pp. 119-178.

Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America, co-edited with Malayna Raftopoulos (University of London Press, 2016). OA (2020): https://humanities-digital-library.org/index.php/hdl/catalog/book/provincialising-nature.

Peer-reviewed book chapters and journal articles

‘History of Knowledge through the Global South: A Case for Entangled Ecologies’, in Displacing Theory Through the Global South, edited by Iracema Dulley and Özgün Eylül İşcen (ICI Press Berlin), in press.

‘An Ecology of Absences: Remapping North-South Border Narratives in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive’, in Narratives of Precarious Migrancy in the Global South, edited by Gigi Adair and Carly McLaughlin (Routledge Literary Cultures of the Global South Series), in press.

‘Peri-urban Communities in Morales’ Bolivia: Class, Indigeneity and Social Exclusion’, co-authored with Malayna Raftopoulos, Tommaso Rossi and Philip Wade. Politics & Society, accepted.

‘Saviour or Dweller? The Managerial Utopia of Spaceship Earth and Andean Geocultural Aesthetics’, in Reducing Climate, edited by Sarath Jakka and Xenia Chiaramonte (ICI Press Berlin), accepted.

‘Embodying Knowledge: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s Anti-extractive Politics of Memory’. Journal of Romance Studies, special issue Intersections of Memory and Sustainability in the Hispanic World, edited by Alison Ribeiro de Menezes, accepted.

‘Critical Border Zones and Anti-extractive Knowledge: Perspectives from the Andean World’. Radical History Review, 145 (2023) Alternatives to the Anthropocene, edited by Ashley Dawson and Naomi Paik, pp. 84-103. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063755.

‘A World without Objects: Epistemic Bordering for a Transformative Future’. FORMA – A Journal of Latin American Criticism & Theory, 2:1 (2023), 109-131. https://www.formajournal.org/coletta.

‘Latin American Readings of Gramsci and the Bolivian Hegemonic Indigenous State’, co-authored with Malayna Raftopoulos.Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 16:1 (February 2021), pp. 47-62 (EV: August 2020). https://doi.org/10.1080/17442222.2020.1805845.

‘Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and the Politics of Plurality: Problematising Global Environmental Governance from Latin America through the Case of Bolivia’, co-authored with Malayna Raftopoulos. Iberoamericana – Nordic Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, 47:1 (November 2018), pp. 108-117 (OA). https://doi.org/10.16993/iberoamericana.429.

‘Imagined Races: From Environmental Determinism to Geographical Authenticity in Twentieth-Century Argentina’. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 38:2 (April 2019), pp. 164-178 (EV: June 2018). https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12787.

‘Introduction: Race and Geography in Latin American History’, co-authored with Andrea Cadelo. Bulletin of Latin American Research, 38:2 (April 2019), pp. 119-120 (EV: June 2018). https://doi.org/10.1111/blar.12835.

‘Whose Natures? Whose Knowledges? Epistemic Politics and Eco-Ontologies in Latin America’, co-authored with Malayna Raftopoulos, in Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America, co-edited with Malayna Raftopoulos (University of London Press, 2016).

‘The Role of Degeneration Theory in Spanish American Public Discourse at the Fin De Siècle: Raza Latina and Immigration in Chile and Argentina’, in Transatlantic Encounters: Tradition and Modernity in the Hispanic World, edited by Eleni Kefala (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 83-103.

‘The Theory of Degeneration in Science and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Europe and Spanish America’, in Ways of Working in Spanish and Hispanic Cultural Studies, edited by Catherine Boyle (La Biblioteca Valenciana/King’s College London, 2007), pp. 83-90.

Translations

‘Poesie di Juan Carlos Galeano / Poems by Juan Carlos Galeano’, Spanish-Italian translation. Zest – Letteratura Sostenibile (19 April 2022): https://www.zestletteraturasostenibile.com/poesie-di-juan-carlos-galeano-poems-by-juan-carlos-galeano-es-en-it/.

Book reviews

Graciela Montaldo, Museums of Consumption: The Archives of Mass Culture in Argentina, 1880-1930, translated by Terry Rugely (Cambria Press, 2021), Cultural and Social History, 20:2 (2023), pp. 309-311.

Fernando DeGiovanni, Vernacular Latin Americanisms: War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline (Pittsburgh University Press, 2019), Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 30:1 (2019), pp. 177-178.

Claudio Canaparo, El imaginario Patagonia. Ensayo acerca de la evolución conceptual del espacio (Peter Lang, 2011), Bulletin of Latin American Research, 35:4 (2016), pp. 512-13.

Jean Franco, Cruel Modernity (Duke University Press, 2013), Journal of Latin American Studies, 48 (2016), pp. 173-74.

Mabel Moraña and Bret Gustafson (eds.), Rethinking Intellectuals in Latin America (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2010), Bulletin of Latin American Research, 34:1 (2015), pp. 99-100.

PhD supervision

Julián Harruch Morales, 'The Latin American Decolonial Project (1990-2020)'.