PILAS Committee Members
If you would like to be a member of the future committee, please email the current PILAS President.
President: Juan Luis Bradley
Juan (he/him) is a PhD researcher at the University of Bristol. His research explores depictions of the everyday materiality of money in Argentine literature and cinema, from the 1990s to the present, with a focus on the affective implications of Argentine money in crisis for those who negotiate it.
Treasurer: Nicolle Alzamora Candanedo
Nicolle (she/her) is a third-year doctoral candidate in Latin American Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research focuses on representations of the Panamanian dictatorship in fiction and its relation to the country’s identity as a site of transit.
📩 Julien.alzamoracandanedo@manchester.ac.uk
📢 @NicolleAlzamora
Secretary: Dylan Diego Bradbury
Dylan (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Manchester. His research applies an "auditory cultures" approach to the cultural politics of indigeneity in central and southern Argentina, focusing on the ways in which different sound technologies and practices of listening have shaped Indigenous identity(s) from the late nineteenth century onwards.
📩 dylandiegobradbury@gmail.com
📢 @_dylandro
Conference Secretary: Emilia Arpini
Emilia Arpini (she/her) is a Political Scientist, and Doctor in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Currently she is finishing her second PhD, now in Politics, at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. She specialises in the topics of participation and local politics. Her current research project focuses on experiences of agroecology in public spaces, led by popular economy movements in Argentina.
📩 e.arpini.1@research.gla.ac.uk
Committee Ordinary Member: Rafael Mendes
Rafael (he/him) is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin researching contemporary Latin American women's writing, the Gothic, and non-normative bodies and identities.
Committee Ordinary Member: Francisco Llinas Casas
Francisco (he/him) is an artist and a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh’s department of Latin American Studies. As part of his artistic practice, Francisco has participated in residencies, developed public artworks, and facilitated socially engaged art projects focused on forced exile and displacement. He is a fellow artist at University of Glasgow's UNESCO Chair Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. His doctoral project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, approaches the Venezuelan migration through an interdisciplinary lens, drawing on literature, aesthetics, and digital culture to reveal transnational phenomena within Venezuelan diaspora culture. He is especially interested in the intersection of gender, race and class, and the legacies of colonialism in the representation of Venezuelan migrants.
Committee Ordinary Member: Zong Yi
Zong Yi (she/her) is a research student in Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the gender roles expressed in the agricultural policies and public food consumption patterns in Angola during the colonial hegemony under the Portuguese Empire, with Brazil as a major comparative reference. She aims to find out the creation and reproduction mechanisms of these gender stereotypes and help improve these inequalities.
Committee Ordinary Member: Lauren Huntzinger
Lauren (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Bristol. She researches environmental literature, rewrites and narratives of climate change. She currently focuses on Colombia, Mexico and Argentina.
📢 @LRHuntzinger
Committee Ordinary Member: Ana Lucía Martínez
Ana Lucía (she/her) is a doctoral candidate in Spanish at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD research delves into the poetics and politics of the residual as depicted in Latin American literature and art from the late 20th to early 21st century. By charting a constellation of residual forms—such as precarity, obsolescence, illness, vulnerability, ruin, and abandonment—her work examines how contemporary cultural production engages with the lingering imaginaries of past epochs. This includes grappling with colonial legacies, the enduring impact of dictatorial regimes, and the pervasive influence of neoliberalism.
📢 ana.lucia.mar
Photo: Molly Avery. Street art in Xela (Quetzaltenango).