Dr Daniel Willis
Research Degree, 2014-2018
Studying for a research degree at the Institute of the Americas left me with a wide range of knowledge and skills that I have been able to put to use in academic and non-academic settings. Whilst at the Institute, I was encouraged to follow my interests but was also supported to explore new research topics and contexts by supervisors and other staff. I was also encouraged to take up important training opportunities available at UCL (e.g. in teaching, language development, research skills) which I developed further during six months’ fieldwork in Lima. The research environment at the Institute, including the regular public seminars and postgraduate research network, were also immensely beneficial for engaging with other researchers and developing my own understanding of Latin American history.
Since leaving UCL, I have published several articles and book reviews in high quality journals, whilst also writing regularly on Latin American history and politics for websites such as New Socialist. Although I am not currently employed in academia, I make use of the research and engagement skills that I developed at the Institute in my role as an policy and campaign manager on economic justice issues at Global Justice Now. In this role I’m able to combine some of my knowledge of Latin American policy issues (e.g. debt, mining) with existing campaigns by civil society and grassroots organisations. Because of this, I believe that studying at the Institute gave me important skills and perspectives on issues that I already cared about and have helped me to develop these into a career.
My recent publications:
- ‘A politics of placelessness? The limits of democratising memory in the Centro de Documentación e Investigación of Lima’s Lugar de la Memoria’, Memory Studies, June 2021.
- ‘Scratched From Memory: The 1986 Prison Massacres and the Limits of Acceptable Memory Discourse in Post-conflict Peru’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, October 2020.
- See more at: https://ucl.academia.edu/DanielWillis and https://muckrack.com/daniel-willis-6
Dr Willis completed his LAHP-AHRC funded PhD, titled The Testimony of Space: Sites of Memory and Violence in Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict, at the UCL Institute of the Americas in 2018, under the supervision of Professor Paulo Drinot.