Prof Rebecca Jarman

Profile

I was born in Montgomeryshire and raised on the Severn Estuary. Much of my life has unfolded in the Andes. My research examines the forces, aspirations, and tensions that forge spaces, communities, and shared imaginaries. It never quite settles in one place, although it is drawn to mountains and cities. Crisis and conflict appears often in my work, along with softer themes: solidarity, beauty, hope. The stories that I tell might end up as academic publications, but they usually start as podcasts, short-form essays, works of fiction, photographs, or videos. Thinking with others is how I learn best, and so collaborations run through everything I do. Recently, I have been exploring autoethnographic methods in creative writing workshops.

A little about my professional trajectory: I arrived at the University of Leeds in September 2015, when I began as a Teaching Fellow in Latin American Studies. I hold an MA in Modern and Medieval Languages, and an MPhil and a PhD in Latin American Studies, awarded by Clare College at the University of Cambridge where I was a Mallinson Scholar. My research has been funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, the Economic & Social Research Council, the Newton Fund, the British Council, and the British Academy. I have held visiting fellowships at the Madrid Institute of Advanced Study and the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

My first book, Representing the Barrios: Culture, Politics, and Urban Poverty in Twentieth-Century Caracas, is published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (you can read more about it below). In academic outlets, I mostly write on political and environmental issues in literature, film, society, and history. My work has appeared in journals including Textual Practice, Modern Language Review, and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among others. I edit the Bulletin of Latin American Research, published by Wiley, and Disaster Dynamics for Oxford Intersections. I speak English, Spanish, and Welsh, and some French and Portuguese. Over the past four years, I have learnt some very basic Quechua.

Research communication is one of the best parts of my job. I often comment on Latin American current affairs for news programmes across the world. In the past year, I have spoken on BBC Radio 4 (Women’s Hour), ABC News, LBC News, TRT News, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Cymru, and elsewhere. I have written for a variety of media outlets, including Jacobin, New Internationalist, BBC History Magazine, Art Monthly, and e-flux. In 2024, I co-produced a short fictional film called The End of the World which screened at major international festivals. I have also worked with theatre professionals to produce performances for the stage. Throughout my career, I have practiced Spanish-English translation and have a portfolio that includes subtitling, and literary and academic texts. See my personal website for examples.

Research interests

A lot of my time at the moment is spent drafting a book that is based on the research findings of my AHRC fellowship, Moving Mountains. Landforms takes its readers to Yungay, a Peruvian town that was buried in 1970 by a landslide. I am writing the book in fragments: literary renditions of landscapes and soundscapes, descriptions of archaeological remains and monuments, autoethnography and character portraits, extracts from testimonies and interviews, encyclopaedic entries on flora and fauna, and creative prose and poetry that I have authored. These are remnants of the apocalypse that I collected when tracing the path of the avalanche, projected by songs, poems, slogans, and stories; by dreams and premonitions; by objects, documents, and artefacts. They are loosely organized in accordance with the co-ordinates of the landslide.

This work has developed from my previous research on Venezuela, where I lived intermittently from 2007 until 2017. My first single-author monograph, Representing the Barrios, came out in 2023. Against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and the growth of a global economy powered by carbon, I argue that in Venezuela, urban poverty is one of the most important resources in national culture and statecraft. Attracting the attentions of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians from within and beyond the limits of Caracas, the barrios are fetishized in the cultural domain as sites of rampant sex, crime, revolution, disease, and violence. The appeal of the urban poor in entertainment is replicated in the policies of autocratic leaders who, operating within an extractivist matrix that prizes the acquisition of land and capital, have sought to expand their reach into these densely populated territories.

I’m also thinking about other things, too, like postcolonial disaster aid, mining tragedies, industrial imperialism, volcanic eruptions, and sacred geological sites. I’d love to hear from you if you share these interests.

Primary investigator (PI)

• Eco-criticism in Times of Crisis: Nature, Capital and Culture in the Hispanic and Lusophone Worlds
• Moving Mountains: Memory, Identity, and the Geological Imaginary after Landslide Disasters

Professional memberships

• Standing Conference for Latin American Studies
• AHRC Peer Review College
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Student education

To me, education means a collective use of the imagination. My undergraduate portfolio spans Latin American literature, history, cinema, and politics from the nineteenth century onwards. I also teach on global cultures of disaster and protest. Many of my lectures move from the classroom to the cinema, the city, or the archive. I promote learning through curiosity and creativity. My students are tasked with sketching, orienteering, and podcasts, as well as more formal assignments like exams and essays. Through their eyes, my perspective on the world is always changing.

I welcome enquiries for postgraduate study. As well as the PhD students listed below, I have supervised the following projects:

• Barbara Grut, “"Left Populism, Charismatic Leadership and Missionary Politics: The Presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador"
• Andrea Vásquez, “Intergenerational learning on disaster preparedness from children to parents: communicating the lived experience of school preparedness plans through immersive technologies”, PhD funded by CONICYT Chile.
• Hayley O’Kell, “The Worth of Women: Hispanic women’s responses to the Early Modern querelle des femmes”, PhD Funded by WRoCAH.

Research groups and institutes

• Politics
• Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American
• Network for Hispanic and Lusophone Cultural Studies
• Conflict
• Digital Cultures
• History
• Participatory research
• Heritage
• Theatre, Music and Performance
• Cultural studies
• Centre for World Cinemas and Digital Cultures
• Centre for Endangered Languages, Cultures and Ecosystems
• Cinema and Television
• Popular culture