Paulo Drinot awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship

The Institute of the Americas is delighted to announce that Professor Paulo Drinot has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship. This three-year award will enable Professor Drinot to work on his new project, a biography of José Carlos Mariátegui.

According to Professor Drinot: ‘I aim to write a new biography of José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), Latin America’s leading Marxist thinker in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, editor of Amauta, the most important avant-garde periodical in early-twentieth century Latin America, and founder of the Peruvian Communist Party. Seen today as a forefather of the revolutionary movements of the 1960s but also of contemporary indigenous and New Left movements, his writings attract increasing attention. An autodidact, he was a major intellectual figure of the early twentieth century and someone who lived with disability for most of his short life. Mariátegui, I believe, can help us think in new ways about some of the defining historical processes of the early twentieth century. Available biographies are dated, largely fail to engage relevant historiographical debates, and have not taken advantage of newly available primary sources. Moreover, the research process that I propose to undertake will uncover further primary sources while addressing one of the key weaknesses of existing biographies: their very thin historical contextualisation. I will pay particular attention to what the study of Mariátegui’s life can tell us about the historical processes that he lived through and to some extent helped to shape, namely (i) the emergence of a transnational cultural avant-garde in the 1920s, (ii) the reframing of the labour question in the wake of the Russian Revolution, and (iii) the early history of global communism.’

Links:

Professor Paulo Drinot - academic profile

Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships scheme

The Leverhulme Trust website

@LeverhulmeTrust Twitter account

Images:

[top] Professor Paulo Drinot

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