UCL Institute of the Americas

Dr. Juan Grigera (UCL Americas) has been awarded funding from the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods to develop methods for natural language processing of newspaper sources to help the building of social conflict databases. The International Visitor Exchange will allow Grigera to do research with the Global Social Protest Research Working Group (led by Prof. Beverly Silver) at the Arrighi Center for Global Studies at John Hopkins University. The project is targeted at advancing online digital and Big Data method and incorporating more advanced NLP techniques to global social history and to overcoming the geographical and historical limitations of the current social unrest datasets.

The discovery of a big batch of previously undisclosed emails related to her private account is bad news for Hillary Clinton, Professor Iwan Morgan, US politics scholar at UCL Institute of the Americas, London, tells DW, as it takes the pressure off Trump and turns it up on Clinton. Read the complete DW interview here.

Dr. Néstor Castañeda and co-investigators Dr. David Doyle (Oxford) and Dr. Cassilde Schwartz (UCL) have been awarded a British Academy-Leverhulme Trust Small Research Grant for a project on tax policy and informality in Latin America. The project studies the attitudes of formal and informal workers towards taxes and public goods in Latin America by fielding an original survey in Mexico City. They will use list experiments to covertly elicit attitudes on tax avoidance and conjoint experiments to capture the multi-dimensional components of tax preferences. Their research project, set to begin in September 2016, seeks to contribute to the debate on sustainable fiscal policies in the region.

Iwan Morgan, Professor of U.S. Studies at University College London's Institute of the Americas, says Hillary Clinton must convince Americans that she represents change. Watch the interview here. 

The Director of the Chinese Institute of Latin American Studies, Dr. Wu Hongying and her colleagues visited UCL this week to discuss possible collaborations and exchange visits. The Beijing-based Institute is part of the prestigious Chinese Institute of International Relations based in Beijing. The meeting with the Chinese visitors was hosted at UCL Institute of the Americas, and attended by Professor Alejandro Madrigal, Pro Vice Provost for Latin America, Professor Maxine Molyneux, Dr. Kate Quinn and Dr. Juan Grigera from UCL Institute of the Americas.

The Director of UCL Institute of the Americas, Professor Jonathan Bell, would like to reassure our student and professional community, as well as prospective students, that in line with UCL policy, it is 'business as usual' at UCL Americas.

Dr Paulo Drinot, Senior Lecturer in Latin American History at UCL Americas will be participating in an international workshop organised by the FIOCRUZ Foundation (Rio de Janeiro) on the challenges currently faced by inter-disciplinary journals. This workshop is funded in part by the British Academy Newton Mobility grant awarded jointly to Dr Drinot and Dr Marcos Cueto (FIOCRUZ). Dr Cueto completed a fruitful research fellowship at UCL Americas earlier in the year. The Desafios de Revistas Interdisciplinares workshop is to take place between June 22 and 25, 2016.

We are delighted to announce that Institute of the Americas graduate Jessica Fernandez De Lara Harada has been awarded a Gates Cambridge scholarship to read for a PhD in the department of Politics and International Studies, at the University of Cambridge. Jessica, along with fifty five international students, was a selected recipient of this prestigious scholarship from a pool of approximately four thousand applicants. Beneficiaries of this award include graduates from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Columbia and the scholarship aims to identify and select applicants who are academically outstanding and are likely to be transformative leaders. 

Due to the generous donation from Professor Nicola Miller and matched funding from the Institute of the Americas we are able to offer one £4,000 bursary towards tuition fees for 2016/17 entry to any of our MA and MSc Programmes. This scheme is open to UK and EU fee status applicants. To be considered for this award you must complete an admissions application and the funding application available to download here by 29th July 2016. Please email your completed funding application to the Postgraduate Programmes Officer, Lauren Hawkridge at l.hawkridge@ucl.ac.uk. The award will be made based on both financial need and academic merit.

We are pleased to announce that our colleague Dr Tony McCulloch has been re-elected as President of the British Association for Canadian Studies (BACS) at its recent annual conference held at the British Library. This follows two years in the post and means that he will now serve for a further year. 2017 will be an especially important year for BACS and Canadianists generally as it marks the 150^th anniversary of the establishment of the Canadian Confederation on 1 July 1867 – generally regarded as the birth of modern Canada.

We would like to congratulate our colleague Professor Iwan Morgan on having a prize and an annual lecture named after him, in recognition of his contribution over many years to the study of US history in London.

Dr Nick Witham’s book The Cultural Left and the Reagan Era: US Protest and Central American Revolution has been awarded the Arthur Miller Centre First Book Prize at the 2016 British Association for American Studies conference. The prize is awarded to the best first book on any American Studies topic published in the preceding calendar year.

The Inter-American Human Rights Network (IAHRN), a research project funded by The Leverhulme Trust and hosted by UCL Institute of the Americas, will hold a discussion forum in Washington which aims to bring scholars together with practitioners and officials at the Inter-American Human Rights System. This event is 

Dr Nick Witham's research project on American historical writing since the Second World War has recently been awarded a British Academy Small Research Grant to fund research at Duke, Harvard, and Stanford universities. At the heart of the project is an exploration of the authorship and reception of significant and widely read popular histories published between the 1940s and the 1990s by American historians Daniel Boorstin, John Hope Franklin, Richard Hofstadter, Gerda Lerner and Howard Zinn. In highlighting the distinct contexts in which this public-facing scholarship was able to flourish, the project sheds light on the historical profession’s influence on the battles between cultural liberalism and social conservatism that have shaped post-war America. It consequently furthers our understanding of the public functions of humanities scholarship in an era when demands are regularly made for 'impact' on society outside of the academy.