Biography

Raquel Ribeiro has a BA in Communication Sciences from NOVA FCSH and a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Liverpool, UK (2009). She was awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship – Nottingham Advanced Research (University of Nottingham, UK, 2010-2012), to develop a project on the memory of the Cuban presence in Angola’s civil war. She was Visiting Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford University (2013-2014) where she taught Brazilian Literature, and lectured in Portuguese Studies at the University of Edinburgh (Assistant and Associate Professor, between 2014-2021). In Edinburgh, she developed several collaborative projects funded by the AHRC: “Afro-Latin (in)visibility and the UN Decade: Cultural politics in motion in Nicaragua, Colombia and the UK” and “Visibilizing Afro Cultural Connections and Geopolitical Dynamics in Nicaragua, Colombia, San Andrés and Providencia“; and “Ixchel: Building understanding of the physical, cultural and socio-economic drivers of risk for strengthening resilience in the Guatemalan cordillera” (funded by the National Environment Research Council/NERC). In 2021, she was a Fellow of the Leverhulme Trust (UK). As a freelance writer and journalist she has published in several media (Portugal, United Kingdom, Luxembourg and in Latin America). She was awarded the Gabriel García Márquez Cultural Periodism Scholarship by the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Latinoamericano (Colombia) and is a member of the Cuba Research Forum (Nottingham).

Research fields

• Cultural studies
• History and memory
• Global South

Selected publications

• Ribeiro, Raquel, “Comunidade afetiva transatlântica: Nicolás Guillén e a poesia revolucionária lusófona,” in Heranças pós-coloniais nas literaturas de língua portuguesa, organised by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Phillio Rothwell, 245-262. Porto: Afrontamento, 2020. [link]
• Ribeiro, Raquel, “Afro-Latino-América,” in The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development, edited by Julie Cupples, Marcela Palomino-Schalscha and Manuel Prieto, 236-251. London: Routledge, 2019. [link]
• Ribeiro, Raquel, ““Seremos (otra vez) como el Che”? Angola as an “alternative narrative” to Cuba in the 1970s,” in Cuba’s Forgotten Decade. How the 1970s Shaped the Revolution, edited by Emily J. Kirk; Anna Clayfield and Isabel Story, 209-225. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. [link]
• Ribeiro, Raquel. “The meaning of internationalism when the Cubans ‘‘exporting’’ the revolution or becoming ‘‘the good colonizers’’?,” Outre-Mers. Revue d’histoire 102 (2014): 267-286. [PDF]

Main projects

• Researcher in the project “Ixchel: Building understanding of the physical, cultural and socio-economic drivers of risk for strengthening resilience in the Guatemalan cordillera” — Coordinated by Eliza Calder (University of Edinburgh) and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. 2021-2023 [link]
• Coordinator of the project “Remembering Angola: the cultural memory of the Cubans in the Angolan civil war” — Hosted by the University of Edinburgh and funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 2021
• Researcher in the project “Visibilizing Afro cultural connections and geopolitical dynamics in Nicaragua, Colombia, San Andrés and Providencia” — Coordinated by Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 2019-2021 [link]
• Collaborator in the project “Afro-Latin (in)visibility and the UN Decade: Cultural politics in motion in Nicaragua, Colombia and the UK” — Coordinated by Julie Cupples (University of Edinburgh) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. 2017-2018 [link]