Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies

Research groups

Bristol is one of the great Atlantic ports, linked historically to the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking worlds. We work on the nature of connections in large international and regional collaborations such as the 19th-century International Hispanists Network; LUDENS (sport and football); Long-18th-century Studies; and the New Woman project. We have ongoing research collaborations with the Universidad Pontificia in Chile and the University of Las Palmas. The Ramon Llull Institute supports our work in Catalan Studies.

We welcome applicants with cross-disciplinary projects. A high number of our postgraduates are supervised across multiple disciplines (eg education, earth sciences, history of art, translation studies, history).

From earth science to sport, visual arts to history, linguistics to literature, our work matters to multiple academic fields. Collectively, we value and explore the composite nature of our subject. Our students collaborate with their postgraduate colleagues across multiple disciplines, for example in the graduate-led Literary and Visual Cultures grouping. Among our cross-disciplinary projects at present are:

• volcanoes and disasters (School of Earth Sciences)
• Atlantic studies (School of Arts, School of Humanities)
• sport (Department of Italian, School of History of Art)
• landscapes (Graduate School of Arts and Humanities)
• internationalism (School of History of Art)
• linguistics (Department of German)

Our wide-ranging work matters beyond academia. We encourage graduate students to have a wider impact beyond their written research. Each year we hold a Cultural Week (Semana Cultural) involving organisations such as Choque Cultural in Brazil. Our chair of Latin American studies was named an Officer of the Order of Isabel la Católica for his services to Spanish culture. Our researchers have worked with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Parliamentary Committee on Guinea-Bissau, rural communities in Peru and the Prince’s Teaching Institute.

Careers

The majority of graduates from this programme develop careers as academics in higher education, while maintaining the capacity to undertake new and innovative research in the field of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American studies.