Academic Champion Role for Maria Blanco

Trinity Fellow María del Pilar Blanco has been named Academic Champion at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH).

The role of Academic Champion is brand new to TORCH; in her new role Dr Blanco will oversee partnerships and provide support to emerging and interdisciplinary networks within and beyond the humanities. She has been a longstanding contributor to TORCH activities since her arrival in Oxford, most recently hosting the Puerto Rican novelist, Eduardo Lalo, as a TORCH Global South Visiting Fellow.

Dr Blanco is Trinity’s Fellow in Spanish American Literature. Her work has focused on such areas as ghosts and haunting in literary and cultural texts; popularization of science in Spanish America, and global modernisms. She is the author of Ghost-Watching American Modernity: Haunting, Landscape, and the Hemispheric Imagination (2012) and co-editor of Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (2020), The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory (2013) and Popular Ghosts: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (2010). She is currently completing a book entitled Modernist Laboratories: Science and the Poetics of Progress in Fin-de-Siècle Spanish America.

Dr Blanco says: ‘As someone whose work is interdisciplinary and comparative, TORCH has been like a second home to me during my time at Oxford. In the next three years, I hope to facilitate conversations and collaborations amongst colleagues whose work has led them to think beyond the boundaries of their own disciplines.’