
Dr Paul Merchant - orcid.org/0000-0003-1323-5004
Environmental Humanities Fellow, September - October 2021
Home Institution: University of Bristol
Paul Merchant is Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, where he is also co-director of the Centre for Environmental Humanities. His current research, funded by an AHRC Leadership Fellowship, explores visual and audiovisual creative responses to ecological challenges on the coasts of Chile and Peru. He is the author of Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming) and co-editor of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020).
Project Title: Rethinking the Blue Humanities from the Pacific Ocean
As an Environmental Humanities Visiting Research Fellow at IASH, Paul will be investigating new ways of conceiving of the blue humanities by incorporating under-explored insights from the Pacific region. By putting Pacific Island perspectives in dialogue with those of groups such as the Mapuche in Chile and Afro-Peruvian communities on Peru’s central coast, the project will work towards constructing a new decolonial theoretical framework for blue humanities in the Pacific. The research will combine close analysis of textual and visual materials with semi-structured interviews with relevant artists, curators and creative practitioners.