Eliot Edmonds

About

I am a first-year PhD student in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. My research is supervised by Fabienne Viala, Professor in Hispanic and Caribbean Studies, and Lucy Evans, Associate Professor in Postcolonial Literature at the University of Leicester.

Research

My doctoral project compares the shifts in the relationships between Jamaica and Puerto Rico’s popular music and performance cultures and their respective prose and poetry. My research will cover literature published between 1970-2020, but engage music and performance cultures which span the long history of the post-columbian Caribbean. I will examine how these distinct cultural forms converge in their political aesthetics especially in the beginning of the period studied. However, I will also attend to how they diverge, particularly as later popular music genres on both islands veer towards a more explicitly sexual, sometimes violent, and often overtly consumerist performance. By addressing both the presences and absences of the dialogue between these cultural forms, I will consider the (in)coherences of each’s approach to—and resistance of—their colonial contexts, both historic and ongoing.

Research Interests

• Caribbean Popular Music and Performance Cultures

• Caribbean Literature (Prose and Poetry)

• Caribbean Philosophy and Theory

• Political Aesthetics of Caribbean Cultural Production

• Intermedial Cultural Dialogue (Music, Performance, Literature)

• Anticolonial and Decolonial Cultures of Resistance

• Latin American Literature

• Latin American Cultural and Political Theory

Scholarships and Awards

• M4C Doctoral Training Partnership, University of Warwick (2025-2029)

• Simon Bolívar Scholar, University of Cambridge (2024)

• Worts Travel Award, University of Cambridge (2024)

• Gibson Spanish Scholar, University of Cambridge (2023)

• Ruth and Mike Smith Words and Music Prize, University of Cambridge (2021)

Qualifications

• M.Phil in Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge (2024)

• B.A. (Honours) in English Literature, University of Cambridge (2021)

Certifications

• SIELE C1 Certification, Instituto Cervantes and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (June 2022)