People

Top row: Axel Körner, Adam Smith, Stephen Wilkinson.
Middle row: Maike Thier, Kate Ferris, Natalia Bas.
Bottom row: Nicola Miller.

Fund-holders:
Dr Nicola Miller, Reader in Latin American History, UCL
(Argentina; Cuba)
Dr Axel Körner, Reader in European History, UCL
(Italy)
Dr Adam Smith, Lecturer in History of the United States, UCL
(Great Britain)

Further members:
Dr Kate Ferris, Research assistant, 3 years
(Spain)
Dr Stephen Wilkinson, Research assistant, 1 year
(Source gatherer for Argentina & Cuba)
Maike Thier, PhD student, 3 years
(France)
Natalia Bas, PhD student, 3 years
(Brasil)

Dr Nicola Miller

Nicola Miller, co-fund-holder, is Reader in Latin American History at UCL, where she has been teaching since 1990. The Images of America project brings together her long-standing interests in international history, comparative history and intellectual and cultural history. Her first book was Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989), during the course of which she became interested in the role of Marxism in Latin America. That led on to her next book, a survey of intellectuals’ ideas about national identity, entitled In the Shadow of the State: Intellectuals and the Quest for National Identity in Spanish America (Verso, 1999). She is currently completing a monograph on Latin American intellectuals ideas about modernity, called Distinctly Modern: Latin American Intellectuals Imagine the Future. She is also editing a collection of papers on When Was Latin America Modern? (Institute for the Study of the Americas, forthcoming) and has published many other articles on the international and intellectual history of Latin America.

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Dr Axel Körner

Axel Körner is Reader in Modern European History in the History Department of UCL. Together with Nicola Miller and Adam Smith he is one of the project's fund holders, working on Images of the United States in nineteenth century Italy. After studying History, Musicology and Philosophy in Bonn and Berlin he obtained a Maîtrise d'Histoire from the University Lyon II and a PhD from the European University Institute in Florence (1995).

His first book, Das Lied von einer anderen Welt. Kulturelle Praxis im französischen und deutschen Arbeitermilieu 1840-1890 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1997) analyses the role of culture in the formation of class consciousness in France and Germany. He is editor and co-author of 1848 - A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (London: Macmillan, 2000; revised pb-edition Palgrave, 2003) and co-author of Urbane Eliten und Kultureller Wandel. Bologna-Leipzig-Linz-Ljubljana (Vienna: Verlag für Geselleschaftskritik, 1996). He is currently completing a monograph on The Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy.

His publications include articles and chapters in English, French, Spanish and German on the history of theatre, the role of intellectuals in Liberal Italy, on the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 and on theoretical and methodological debates in the humanities and the social sciences. His most recent article analyses concepts of political representation in Liberal Italy, published in Modern Italy (November 2005). A chapter on cultural modernisation in the periphery of the Habsburg Empire is forthcoming as part of a collective volume on Modernity and Modernism in Central Europe.

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Dr Adam Smith

Adam Smith is a Lecturer in American History at UCL and one of the fund holders for this AHRC-funded project. His principal interest is in the political history of the United States, especially electoral politics, political communication and the relationship between politics and nationalism. His work has concentrated on the Civil War period. A book on politics in the North during the Civil War, entitled No Party Now: Politics in the Civil War North, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2006. Adam has also written about American political culture, representations of the past in contemporary societies, and national identity in Britain and the United States. His interest in this project arises from a long-standing interest in the idea of America and its representation around the world, especially in the era before the United States came to be a dominant military and political power.

more information

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Dr Kate Ferris

Kate Ferris is postdoctoral research assistant at UCL, working on the AHRC-funded research project ‘The American way of life: Images of the United States in nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America’, with responsibility for the case-study of Spain. Following studies in History, International Relations and Italian at Sussex University and the London School of Economics, she recently completed her PhD thesis, which examined the everyday, lived experience of fascism in 1930s Venice, at University College London (2005).

Her research interests lie in the social/cultural history of modern Italy and Spain and, particularly, in questions of cultural production and reception and in the ‘lived experience’ and negotiation of daily life in the context of dictatorship. As part of the ‘Images of America’ project, she is currently working towards a monograph on culture and perceptions of modernity in late-nineteenth-century Spain, as well as preparing her doctoral thesis for publication. In addition, she has an article, “Fare di ogni famiglia italiana un fortilizio: The League of Nations’ economic sanctions and everyday life in Venice”, forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Italian Studies.

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Dr Stephen Wilkinson

Stephen Wilkinson was born in Mansfield, England, in 1956. He has a PhD on the subject of Cuban detective fiction. Stephen has for many years written on various aspects of Cuban history, society, politics and culture. His book: Culture and Society in Cuban Detective Fiction is to be published by Peter Lang, Oxford, in 2006.

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Maike Thier

Maike Thier is one of two PhD-students involved in the ‘Images of the United States’-project. She graduated from University College London with a B.A. in History in 2004 and completed an M.Phil. in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge (Newnham College) in 2005. Interested in the relationship between culture and politics and the dynamics of cultural nationalism in the multi-national Habsburg Empire, she wrote her M.Phil-dissertation on the celebrations on the occasion of the centenary of the German poet Friedrich Schiller’s birthday in Vienna in 1859.

Maike Thier is responsible for the project’s case-study of France. Under the supervision of Dr. Körner and Dr. Smith, she intends to analyse the production and reception of images of the United States in late-nineteenth century France for her PhD. In the context of this project, she is interested in French interpretations of ‘modernity’, discourses on cultural and national identity and debates on the United States as a possible ‘model republic’ for France itself.

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Natalia Bas

Natalia Bas obtained a licentiate degree in History at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and a MA in the History of Race in the Americas at the University of Warwick. Her first field of research was Egyptology. She was member of the Archaeological Argentine Mission working in Tell el-Ghaba, North Sinaí, an archaeological site of the Saite period, and of the Argentine Mission in a tomb in the Valley of the Nobles, Luxor, where she was in charge of the epigraphic survey. Her previous research also includes a study on the pictorial reappearance of the Egyptian myth of Osiris in the Italian Renaissance. For this research she applied the concept of “das nachleben der
antike” coined by Aby Warburg to describe the transmission and survival of the classical tradition. Her MA dissertation examined peasant rebellion in Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia) at the end of the colonial period.

She has now started her PhD research on nineteenth-century Brazilian history as part of the project “The American Way of Life: Images of the US in Europe and Latin America”.

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This page last modified 27 January, 2010 by [Webmaster]