Emilia Curatola Fernández

Cultural Production, Ideology and 
Struggle in Peru, 1956-1989

Principal supervisor: Professor Paulo Drinot, UCL Institute of the Americas.
Subsidiary supervisor: Dr Bill Booth, UCL Institute of the Americas & Dr Stephanie Schwartz, UCL History of Art.

Emilia Curatola Fernández is a sociologist from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and holds a master’s degree in visual arts from the Università IUAV di Venezia. She is currently a PhD student at the Institute of the Americas, University College London (UCL). Her doctoral project focuses on the role of cultural productions in the labour and popular movement in Peru during the 1950s-1980s. Her fields of research are related to the Latin American political, intellectual and cultural history and the visual studies.  

My research focuses on the role of cultural productions in a period of great unionisation and politicisation of the labour and popular movement in Peru during the 1950s-1980s. The project aims to rethink these decades through the poetic and visual productions and the cultural activity within the unions of a group of working-class intellectuals, poets and artists who participated in the circulation and discussion of radical political ideas in the country. In this way, I will examine how their cultural productions were marked by the economic, political, ideological and technological processes of those years, a time that opened with the impact of the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution (1959) and the expansion of the guerrillas and social movements in Latin America and closed with the fall of the Soviet bloc and the emergence of neoliberalism in the late 1980s.  

PhD funding

• UCL Research Excellence Scholarship

Education

• MA Visual Arts, Università IUAV di Venezia
• BA Sociology, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP)