Ailsa Peate

I am Senior Lecturer in Latin American and Museum Studies, and co-Course Leader on the MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture and MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture with Professional Experience. Previously, I worked as Senior Teaching Associate in Spanish at Lancaster University, and before joining Westminster I held the post of Post-Doctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Standard Grant project Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict at the University of Liverpool, working with Colombian museums, memory spaces, and NGOs to create participatory arts events and to question museum and heritagisation practices as regards gender representation in light of the country's conflict.

I undertook my undergraduate and MA studies at the University of Glasgow (MA Hons French and Spanish; MLitt European Studies) and obtained my PhD from the University of Liverpool. My thesis explored how long-standing histories of gender violence and social (in)justice in Cuba and Mexico have informed the countries’ detective fiction with a focus on representation of gender and sexuality. During my PhD I held roles as Research Assistant in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, and as Research Associate in the cross-institutional Institute of Cultural Capital (the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University), as well as teaching advanced Spanish on the University of Liverpool's Continuing Education programme.

My research focuses on the processes of symbolic reparations and heritage in Latin America from a gender perspective; narratives of heritage in Colombia and Mexico; ethical approaches to visibilising women's narratives in Mexican and Colombian museums as well as in the Colombian diaspora in the UK; how heritage is constructed contemporarily in a context of violence and trauma in Mexico; necropolitics; narcopolitics, gore capitalism (Valencia, 2010) and the narcopatriarchy in northern Mexico; gender and sexuality in visual and popular cultures; women, beauty, and power in northern Mexican narcoculture; pre-transitional and transitional justice, and participatory action research in cultural institutions from below.