Ramón de Santiago researches the trans-Pacific transfer of visual and material culture between South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Latin America in the Early Modern period, with a particular interest in pre-colonial systems of inscription in the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and Southeast China Sea. Theoretical interests include questions of historiography in trans-oceanic systems, and visual and material practices as evidence of ethnographic refusals. De Santiago's current project uses multidisciplinary methods to investigate the layers of exchange of objects, goods, and people through Early...
My work looks at an emerging movement against mercury exposure from illegal gold mining within Munduruku territory, situated within Tapajós River Basin of the Central Brazilian Amazon. I am particularly interested in the relationship between indigenous and western scientific knowledge practices in evidencing harm from chemical exposure within one of the most heavily mined indigenous territories in all of Brazil. Since 2016, I have worked in the Tapajós River Basin as a collaborator alongside indigenous and riverine associations. In the past, I was technical...
Tessa Wood is a Ph.D. student in Comparative Literature and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between literature and discourses surrounding public and popular education in Brazil and Spanish America. In particular, it examines how literature offers critical revisions to narratives that frame education as a humanizing or emancipatory project, especially those that portray it as a means of integrating subjects on the periphery of national identity. At UC Berkeley, she co-organizes the Brazilian Studies Working...
Carlotta Wright de la Cal is a Ph.D. student in History. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous history, labor, and migration policy. Carlotta's dissertation examines how railroad corporations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands reshaped mobility, labor patterns, and border control in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project centers the experiences and resistance strategies of transborder Indigenous communities who were displaced and incorporated into emerging systems of labor recruitment, surveillance, and territorial governance in both the...
