Announcement of the 2026–27 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellows

Blog series Americas and Oceania Collections

Shane Berry (University of Nottingham) – The clandestine world of Loyalist spy networks during the American Revolution.

Richard Bramwell (Wolfson College, University of Cambridge) – History of emcee culture in Jamaica.

Joseph Borsato (Queen's University) – the representations of Indigenous sovereignty in English and French cartography relating to the early-colonial Caribbean and New France.

David Barnes (University of Oxford) – 'white modernities' or the impact of New Imperialism and American global hegemony on transatlantic modernist writing.

Mollie Carlyle (independent researcher) – How African American and Caribbean folk and traditional musical forms shaped the development of maritime music.

Hakima Choukri (University of Abdelmalek Essaadi) – Intersections of trauma, history, and culture in Arab American women's literature and identity.

Ana Edwards and Hope Strickland (artist-filmmakers) – Research for a new moving image work that explores John Dee's use of the obsidian mirror as a tool for British colonial expansion into the Americas.

Ashley Everson (University of Maryland, College Park) – Claudia Jones, Amy Garvey and pan African feminist political thought.

Heidi Feldman (Visiting Scholar, University of California San Diego) – The first biography of Afro-Peruvian multidisciplinary artist, folklorist, and cultural icon Victoria Santa Cruz.

Chloe Foor (University of Texas) – Understandings of physical space in the New Kingdom of Granada (modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama) during the colonial era.

Mario Luis Grangeia (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) – Gilberto Gil in Anglophone Eyes: British Press, Exile, and Cultural Mediation.

Paige Groot (Queen's University) – War, revolt, and ecology in the British Ceded Islands, 1769-1796.

Rebecca Ruth Gould (SOAS) – Ameen Rihani and the institutional and political forces that shaped the reception, marginalisation, and afterlife of his literary oeuvre.

Peter Hulme (University of Essex) – William Carlos Williams in the Caribbean.

Asheesh Kapur Siddique (University of Massachusetts Amherst) – The Ideological Origins of “Written” Constitutionalism.

Salomé Ketabi (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) – History of scientific travel and imperial revolutions in the Caribbean (1790s-1840s).

Maija Makela (Trinity College Dublin) – Fanny Howe's depiction of US American bureaucracy and justice systems.

Alice McCusker (University of East Anglia) – Potential trans narratives in Lesbian pulp fiction.

Gayle Murchison (William & Mary) – Music and Migration: Jazz-pianist composer Mary Lou Williams in London and Paris

Lucy O'Sullivan (University of Birmingham) – Remembering the Cristero war with the Mexican diaspora in the UK.

Dinos Pappas (University of Stirling) – Native American educational movements and cultural sovereignty in the United States, 1970–1990.

Javier Rodriguez (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso) – Global South Sounds in Britain: Imaginaries of Latin American and African Song in the Sue Steward Collection (1983–2015).

Dr Tessa Roynon (independent scholar and librarian, Oxford) – The books that Toni Morrison commissioned and edited in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Hugo Rueda Ramirez (McGill University) – The role of British cartographic collections in shaping the work of the Chilean intellectual José Toribio Medina (1852–1930).

Patience Schell (University of Aberdeen) – A history of Manuel Antonio Carreño’s courtesy and citizenship guide (Manual de urbanidad y buenas maneras), a publishing phenomenon across the Spanish-speaking world from 1853 to the present.

Jordan B. Smith (Widener University) – An examination of how family, slavery, and violence structured Britain's eighteenth-century Atlantic world.

Emily Stevenson (University of Oxford) – Early modern Indigenous language lists.

Caroline Tracey (independent researcher) – A history of the sugar beet industry in North America and how it transformed the region's economy, ecology, and demographics.

Juliet Wiersema (University of Texas) – William Hacke’s South Sea Waggoners and the Spanish Pacific.

Elli Michaela Young (Middlesex University) – Clothing, resistance and cultural survival in Jamaica, 1750–1834.

As part of our continued collaboration with the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS) and their Bulletin for Latin American Research (BLAR), we are especially pleased to welcome this year’s SLAS BLAR Visiting Fellow, Maria Corredor (Cornell University), whose project explores how maps, surveys, and official observations shaped Spain’s geographical conception of the Pacific Americas.

We warmly congratulate all of this year’s fellows and look forward to supporting their research and sharing their findings over the coming year.