Stephanie Panichelli-Batalla, co-director

Stéphanie is a Professor in Global Sustainable Development and also the University's Academic Director for Sustainability. She has been working on Cuba for the past twenty years, with a particular interest in Cuban culture, human rights and more recently, Cuba’s involvement in global health. Her first co-authored monograph analysed the relationship between Fidel Castro and Colombian Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez (Gabo y Fidel. El paisaje de una amistad (Espasa Calpe) / Fidel and Gabo. The Portrait of a Friendship (Pegasus 2010). The book was translated into six languages. Her second monograph analyses the testimony of a persecuted homosexual Cuban writer in Reinaldo Arenas’ Pentagony (Tamesis Books, 2016).

Stéphanie’s current research focuses on the impact of Humanitarian Aid on identity construction and alteration, and more specifically on the case of the Cuban Internationalist Solidarity Programme. In the summer of 2014, she was awarded the British Council Researcher Links grant and was a visiting research fellow at the Cuban Heritage Collection (University of Miami), where she created an archive entitled “Life Stories of Cuban Internationalist Healthcare Professionals”. More recently, she was awarded the Warwick Research Development Fund award for a project on South-South cooperation between Cuba and the African continent, with a specific focus on Tanzania.

Stephanie’s articles have appeared in journals including Third World Quarterly, Oral History, Humor: International Journal of Humor Studies, among others. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Philology from the University of Granada, Spain.

Pierre Botcherby, co-director

I am currently a Teaching Fellow in French Studies in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, a post I took up in February 2024.

I have previously worked in the Modern Records Centre as the Outreach & Widening Participation Officer, in the Faculty of Arts as the Doctoral Training Manager, and in the Doctoral College as a Postgraduate Development Officer.

I have used oral history as part of my PhD thesis, which explored community, de-industrialisation, and urban regeneration in the context of my hometown, St. Helens (near Liverpool). I conducted my own interviews and also exploited collections of interviews from the 1980s.

I have also worked with Warwickshire Wildlife Trust on an oral history of Binley Colliery in Coventry. The mine closed in the 1960s but has continued to have an impact on the local community. WWT worked with Warwick students to produce a commemorative booklet about the mine (which is now a nature reserve), in which the testimonies of local residents featured heavily. I have written an article on this project in the 2024 issue of Oral History.