Contact details

Email: Elizabeth dot Chant at warwick dot ac dot uk

Room: R3.16 (Ramphal Building)

Term-time office hours: Fridays 10-11 (in person), Wednesdays 11-12 (Teams). Administrative enquiries: UGGSD@warwick.ac.uk

Assistant Professor

Qualifications

• PhD Spanish and Latin American Studies, University College London
• MPhil European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures, University of Cambridge
• BA English Literature and Spanish, University of Durham
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Background

I joined GSD as an Assistant Professor in January 2024 having previously worked in Liberal Arts and Hispanic Studies at Warwick. I am an interdisciplinary scholar with broad interests spanning map history, environmental history, visual culture, tourism studies, sustainable heritage, and Latin American studies.

In GSD I currently teach GD124 Interdisciplinary Approaches to Global Sustainable Development (with Dr Katie Reeves) and GD331 Travelling through Nature: Tourism, Culture, and Sustainability. I previously taught HP229 Aquatic Latin America in Hispanic Studies.

I am also interested in issues of higher education reform. In my Hispanic Studies role I was the Widening Participation Lead for the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, and I continue to work with a student-led team as part of the Warwick 'Designing for Inclusion' project which seeks solutions to issues faced by Widening Participation Students. I am a first-generation student myself and would be happy to answer any questions about university study from prospective applicants.

Research Interests

My research background is in Latin American cultural studies, with a special focus on environmental humanities approaches. I draw on expertise from history, critical theory, art history and anthropology to examine how humans have consumed 'nature' in the Americas, and how ideas of American nature have been constructed. I work primarily on materials from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, so I am interested in the late Spanish colonial period through to the latter stages of nation-building. I look to a variety of sources in my scholarship, but I am especially interested in visual culture, and often work closely with maps and travel ephemera.

My primary geographical area of study has been Patagonia (present-day Argentina and Chile). I am currently developing a monograph, Land of the Future: Patagonia between Desolation and Grandeur, which analyses conflicting cultural representations of this region in order to elucidate how the trope of Patagonian desolation was both perpetuated and dismissed in the facilitation of acts of annexation, colonisation, and extraction. I am further developing a new research project, 'Touring the Capitalocene: Modernity and Dark Tourist Ecologies in the Americas', which explores domestic tourism to industrial sites in former frontier territories in Argentina, Chile, and the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century.

My research has previously been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK Society for Latin American Studies, and the ARTES Iberian and Latin American Visual Culture Group. I have also been awarded fellowships at the Newberry Library, Huntington Library, and Library of Congress.

I am a trustee of the International Society for the History of the Map (ISHMap).

Administration and Service:

Academic Administration:

Study abroad and Partnerships Co-ordinator for Global Sustainable Development

Library Liaison for the School for Cross-Faculty Studies

Publications

(Forthcoming) Elizabeth Chant, 'Antarctic Futures: Francisco Coloane and Literary Nationalism’, Life-writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances (eds. Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins), London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.

Elizabeth Chant, ‘Reading Fuegian Narratives and Nonhuman Sensibility in Francisco Coloane's Patagonian TalesLink opens in a new window’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 33, no. 2 (June 2024).

Natalia Gándara Chacana and Elizabeth Chant, Islas de ensueño. La imagen de Juan Fernández como una frontera ambiental y civilizacional, Revista Historia y Patrimonio 2, no. 3 (December 2023): 1-20.

Elizabeth Chant, ‘The Patagonian Charts of the Atlas marítimo del Reyno de el Perù, Chile, Costa Patagónica Oriental, y Occidental (1797)’, Imago Mundi, 75, no. 2 (2023).

Elizabeth Chant and Natalia Gándara Chacana, ‘Reimagining the Juan Fernández Islands: Steamer Tourism and the Commodification of NatureLink opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window’, Shima: The Island Studies Journal, 17, no. 1 (Spring 2023).

Elizabeth Chant and Natalia Gándara Chacana, 'Mapas como fuentes para la historia ambiental hispanoamericana', Historia ambiental de América Latina. Enfoques, procedimientos y cotidianeidades (eds. Pedro S. Urquijo, Adi Lazos, and Karine Lefebvre), Morelia: Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía Ambiental, UNAM, 2022, 333-348.

Elizabeth Chant, 'Learning to Look: Latin American Plant Humanities', CLACS Latin American Diaries Blog, June 2022.