About

Dr Michela Coletta is Assistant 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. She continues to collaborate with CLACS as Associate Research Fellow.

In her doctoral work Michela specialised in intellectual and cultural history of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, with a focus on cultural modernity and ideas of degeneration. Her monograph Decadent Modernity: Civilisation and Latinidad in Spanish America, 1880-1920 was published by LUP in 2018 (paperback 2021). She has also contributed book chapters on the origins of degeneration theory in the medical and sociological discourse of late-nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America (La Biblioteca Valenciana/King’s College London, 2007) and on ideas of race and immigration in Chile and Argentina (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). In her work bridging the fields of modernity studies, environmental humanities and decolonial studies, Michela approaches the history and politics of the environment in Latin America from the perspective of cultural and intellectual history. She is co-author of the chapter ‘Whose Natures? Whose Knowledges? An Introduction to Epistemic Politics and Eco-Ontologies in Latin America’, published in the volume Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (ILAS Book Series, 2016), of which she is also co-editor. The book can be downloaded for free here. Her latest publications include: the co-authored paper Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and the Politics of Plurality: Problematising Global Environmental Governance from Latin America through the Case of Bolivia (2018); a co-edited special section on Race and Geography in Latin American History for BLAR (2019), which includes her article on Imagined Races in Twentieth-Century Argentina; the co-authored article Latin American readings of Gramsci and the Bolivian indigenous nationalist stateLink opens in a new window (2020); the chapter 'An Ecology of Absences: Remapping North-South Border Narratives in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive' (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).

Michela is the recipient of an EU Horizon 2020 individual grant to write a global history of ideas and cultures of "living well" with a focus on Andean and Amazonian epistemologies at FUB Berlin, 2022-2024.