UCL Institute of the Americas

UCL President and Provost Professor Malcolm Grant officially launched the UCL Institute of the Americas on Wednesday 3 October 2012 at BMA House, Bloomsbury.

The launch featured a keynote address from the distinguished historian of the Americas and Provost of Columbia University, Professor John Coatsworth.
The Institute Director, Professor Maxine Molyneux also welcomed the large number of guests and laid out the aims of the Institute. Professor Coatsworth's lecture, entitled 'The Integration and Dis-Integration of the Western Hemisphere’ addressed the history of US intervention of Latin American and Caribbean politics.

Maxine Molyneux said ‘The Americas are a site of some of the great historical themes - colonialism, slavery, revolutions – and continue to excite some of the most intense scholarly debates whether over their divergent economic and social trajectories or over their innovations in social policy, science and technology. The continent is itself a site of high quality innovative research carried out in region and across region as a function of global knowledge transfer and yet much of that excellence, particularly in the South of the continent is too little acknowledged.