Global culture and history are fundamental to our work. We research how Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries shaped the world across Europe, America, Africa, and Asia. We ask how they fit into the wider globe, and explore new ways to express those relationships.

Our work involves numerous different subjects, and matters to multiple academic fields. From memory to sport, visual arts to history, linguistics to literature, we ask what it means to research in a composite discipline.

It is estimated that the combined total number of Spanish speakers across the world is close to 500 million. Spanish is the fourth  most widely spoken  language in the world, the second most studied language, the second language in international communication and by a wide margin the second language today in the United States.

Portuguese is the ninth most spoken language in the world, with over 250 million speakers. It is the official language of nine countries in Europe, America, Africa and Asia: Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé & Príncipe, East Timor and Macau. 

Our research specialisms also include Catalan studies, with a particular focus on Catalan sociolinguistics. Catalan is spoken by around ten million people across Spain, France, Andorra and Italy, and is the vehicle of a fascinating and vibrant culture.

HiPLA is a wide-ranging and research-driven department with a vast array of expertise covering four continents, and we benefit from our location: Bristol is one of the great Atlantic ports, linked historically to the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds and a crucial place to study Slavery and Atlantic studies.

Research areas

Researchers in HiPLA work in a diverse and complementary collection of areas, disciplines and fields, including: Atlantic Studies, Digital Cultures, Film Studies, Gender Studies, History, Linguistics, Memory Studies, Modern and contemporary literature, Race theory, Politics, Sociology, Sport Studies, Visual Culture, War Studies. 

Projects

You can get a good sense of our work by checking out some of our research projects which have been financed by major funding bodies such as the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the European Research Council.

• Bringing Memories in from the Margins: Inclusive Transitional Justice and Creative Memory Processes for Reconciliation in Colombia worked with grassroots partners across Colombia to create new ways of understanding Colombia’s history. Led by Professor Matthew Brown with a big team in the UK and Colombia, this built on previous HiPLA projects using creative ways of telling stories about the past in Latin America, such as Creativity for Peace Festival and the Quipu Project.
• We make every effort to bring our work to wider audiences, as you can see from the websites of our projects. Another good example, led by Dr. Joanna Crow, is Mapping Intercultural Conversations, which explores the networks of Mapuche intellectuals within and beyond Chile in the early twentieth-century.
• We are committed to exploring the relevance of historical processes to demands for social change in the present day. A great example is Modern Marronage: The Pursuit and Practice of Freedom in the Modern World, on which Dr. José Lingna Nafafe is co-investigator.
• Other ongoing or recent projects include Dr. Rachel Randall’s Affective and Immaterial Labour in Latin(x) Culture: Researching cultural representations of wet nurses, migrant domestic workers and sex workers, and Dr. Paul Merchant’s Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present.

HiPLA researchers are also producing pioneering and prize-winning publications. Recent examples include:

• Dr. Francisco Romero Salvadó’s Political Comedy and Social Tragedy: Spain, a Laboratory of Social Conflict, 1892-1921(Liverpool University Press, 2020)
• Dr. Ed King’s Twins and Recursion in Digital, Literary and Visual Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2022)and his open-access book, co-authored with Joanna Page of the University of Cambridge, Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America(UCL Press 2017)
• Dr. José Lingna Nafafe’s Lourenço da Silva Mendonça and the Black Atlantic Abolitionist Movement in the 17th Century (Cambridge University Press, 2022)
• Dr. Joanna Crow’s Itinerant Ideas: Race, Indigeneity and Cross-Border Intellectual Encounters in Latin America (1900-1950) (Palgrave, 2022)
• Dr. James Hawkey’s Language Attitudes and Minority Rights: The Case of Catalan in France (Spring, 2018)
• Dr. Miguel García’s Queering Lorca’s Duende: Desire, Death, Intermediality (Legenda, 2022)
• Professor Matthew Brown’s Sports in South America: A History (Yale University Press, 2023)

You can read our latest research articles through the links on each colleague’s Research Information page.

Associated centres

HiPLA staff work across a range of research institutes and centres at the University of Bristol, including:

• Centre for Environmental Humanities
• Transnational Modernisms
• Literary and Visual Landscapes
• Bristol Poetry Institute
• Migrations Mobilities Bristol
• Centre for Creative Technologies
• Brigstow Institute