
Dr Paul Merchant
MA, MPhil, PhD (Cantab)
Expertise
I work on modern and contemporary film and visual culture from Latin America. My current project explores cultural responses to the Pacific Ocean in Chile and Peru, and I have also written about Chilean and Argentine film.
Current positions
Associate Professor in Latin American Film and Visual Culture
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
Contact
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Biography
I joined the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies in 2017, after completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. My doctoral research formed the basis of my first monograph, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (forthcoming). I also completed Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Cambridge, writing my MPhil dissertation on the fragmentary imagery of the body in the works of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño.
Research interests
My work explores how culture can help us imagine new ways of relating to our environment and responding to ecological crisis. I am currently working on a book about cultural responses to the Pacific Ocean in modern Chile, and Peru. This book, tentatively titled 'The Ocean to Come: Pacific Futures in Chile and Peru', will show how the Pacific Ocean has long been a laboratory for imagining alternative futures in those two countries.
This is an intermedial project, working across film, visual art, poetry and fiction, and drawing on recent advances in the fields of environmental humanities, film studies and Latin American cultural studies. The underlying research was funded by an AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship: 'Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present'.
I joined the Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol in 2017, after completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. My doctoral research formed the basis of my first book, Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). I also completed Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Cambridge, writing my MPhil dissertation on the fragmentary imagery of the body in the works of Roberto Bolaño.
I am interested in how cinema relates to other visual media, in the shifting critical frameworks of Latin American studies, and in the intersections between postcolonial theory and the environmental humanities. I am a co-editor (with Lucy Bollington) of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020), which analyses how discourses of humanism and posthumanism have operated in - and have been shaped by - a wide range of literary and visual cultures in the region. With Natalia Christofoletti Barrenha and Julia Kratje, I also co-edited ReFocus: The Films of Lucrecia Martel (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Research supervision
I welcome enquiries from prospective research students in any area of Latin American cultural studies, particularly those interested in pursuing research in the following areas:
- Latin American film (especially from Argentina, Chile, Bolivia and Peru)
- ecological approaches to cinema and visual media
- urban and domestic spaces
- postcolonial and decolonial theory
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Resituating the Value of the Anthropocene
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
29/03/2023 to 31/08/2024
Languages of Sustainability in Latin America
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
01/02/2023 to 30/09/2023
Navigating Time in the Anthropocene
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
05/03/2021 to 31/07/2021
Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the present
Principal Investigator
Description
This project has two key aims:
1) To reshape academic discussions around visual and audiovisual engagements with the ocean by addressing neglected perspectives from Chile and Peru
2) To further…Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
01/02/2021 to 31/07/2022
The Ocean and the Poetic Imagination in Modern Chile, Bolivia and Peru
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
01/04/2019 to 30/09/2021
Publications
Selected publications
11/01/2022Remaking Home
Remaking Home
Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human
Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human
‘Collecting what the sea gives back’
Bulletin of Latin American Research
Recent publications
29/01/2024Lithium and the Cinematic Temporalities of Argentina's Energy Transition
Environmental Humanities
Navigating Physical and Digital Environments
Bulletin of Latin American Research
Speculative Ecology
MLN Hispanic Issue
The Art of an Ecological Constitution
Facing the Great Derangement
Venice and the 'New World'
Venice and the Anthropocene
Teaching
I convene undergraduate units on responses to the Pacific Ocean in modern Chile (Year 4) and an introduction to Latin American cinema (Year 2). I also contribute to teaching on the Year 1 units 'The Making of the Hispanic World' and 'Critical Concepts in the Study of the Hispanic World', as well as the MA in Comparative Literatures and Cultures in the School of Modern Languages.