At the Latin American Centre our members pursue research that is as diverse as Latin America itself and as interconnected as the challenges the region faces. Our work spans linguistics, anthropology, memory studies, literary criticism, visual arts, pedagogy, and political economy. What unites us is a shared commitment to understanding Latin America in its complexity: as a space of cultural creativity, political struggle, historical wound, and epistemic richness.
We currently conduct research across four overlapping thematic areas, and we actively seek dialogue and collaboration with researchers, institutions, artists, and communities across the region.
LACUA is an interdisciplinary centre, and we believe the most interesting questions about Latin America live at the boundaries between fields. We are actively seeking collaboration with researchers, institutions, artists, communities, and organizations across Latin America and the diaspora particularly around themes of memory and transitional justice, language contact and migration, urban cultures and expressive practices, and decolonial pedagogy and epistemic plurality.
If your work connects with any of these areas, we would love to hear from you. Please contact us
Language in Latin America is never neutral. It carries histories of colonization, migration, and resistance and it continues to shape how communities negotiate identity and belonging across borders.
Susana Fernández investigates intercultural semantics and pragmatics, grammar teaching, and teacher cognition, with a particular interest in how cultural meaning is embedded in everyday language use. She leads the VELUX-funded project When Danish is Made, which explores intercultural pragmatics in Danish-as-a-second-language teaching — a line of inquiry with direct implications for how immigrant and migrant communities from Latin America navigate life in Scandinavia.
Jonathan Mastai Husum focuses on language contact in the border cities between Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where Spanish and Portuguese have blended into portuñol — a contact language that challenges conventional boundaries between nations, cultures, and linguistic norms. His work draws on sociolinguistics, postcolonial theory, and glottopolitics to examine what happens at the edges of language and power.
Together, their work invites collaboration with Latin American universities and research groups interested in bilingualism, minority languages, border identities, and language policy.
Several LACUA members investigate how societies remember and forget , violence, injustice, and rupture, and what cultural, artistic, and political forms this memory takes.
Alexander Ulrich Thygesen works within cultural memory studies, with interests in aesthetics, decolonial theory, social movements, and performance. His current research explores memory activism and urban interventions, including processes of demonumentalization — the contested removal or transformation of monuments as sites of historical reckoning. He serves on the steering committee of the UPAST Memory and Heritage Centre at Aarhus University and co-chairs the Memory Studies Association's Memory and Activism Working Group.
Vladimir Pacheco Cueva examines the socio-economic and political dimensions of resource extraction in Latin America and beyond, with ongoing involvement in a project on Surviving Historical Memory in El Salvador. His most recent work engages with questions of ideology and post-ideology in the region, contributing to the Bloomsbury volume Ideology, Post-ideology and Anti-Ideology in Latin America.
Andrés Chaur, a Visiting PhD Scholar at Aarhus University and doctoral researcher at Université Paris 8 and Universidad Nacional de Colombia, works at the intersection of Memory Studies, Cultural Analysis, and political communication. His research focuses on the role of difference and social cohesion in transitional contexts, drawing on ethnographic work in Colombia. His background at FAO and IOM – UN Migration adds a practitioner dimension to questions of knowledge management and communication in post-conflict settings.
This cluster is particularly open to partnerships with Latin American institutions working on transitional justice, memory sites, human rights documentation, and postconflict peacebuilding.
Latin American cities are laboratories of cultural invention, where marginalized communities build visibility and meaning through music, art, language, and technology.
Derek Pardue has spent decades researching urban culture in São Paulo, Brazil, examining how individuals and communities often on the social margins forge presence through expressive culture: rap music, vernacular language, and spatial networks. His most recent book, Sobrevivendo no Inferno (Bloomsbury, 2021), weaves ethnographic experience with literary interpretation of the legendary Brazilian rap group Racionais MCs, blurring the line between scholarship and storytelling.
Steffen Köhn works as a filmmaker, video artist, and visual anthropologist at the intersection of experimental ethnography, Science and Technology Studies, and fiction. His moving-image practice often centering Cuba engages with alternative infrastructures and strategies of survival and resistance in uneven sociotechnical landscapes. His projects draw on DIY networks, online video game aesthetics, and emerging technologies to reimagine what ethnographic knowledge can look and feel like.
Diana González Martín pursues applied research-creation across Latin America and Europe, asking how making art together opens people to one another across difference. As co-investigator in Transforming Migration by Arts (TransMigrARTS), funded by the European Union, she co-creates artistic workshops with migrant communities in Colombia, France, Spain, and Denmark, building a network of researchers and practitioners working in Spanish and advancing the methodology of applied research-creation in higher education.
We welcome collaboration with cultural centers, community organizations, artists' collectives, and universities in the region interested in co-creating research about urban life, migration, and expressive culture.
LACUA also houses strong expertise in Latin American literary and intellectual traditions, and in the pedagogical and epistemological challenges of decolonizing knowledge.
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen researches Latin American literature across periods and genres , from nineteenth-century Cuban literature on slavery (Juan Francisco Manzano, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Nicolás Guillén) to contemporary movements including neobaroque, magical realism, gaucho literature, and postboom fiction. Her work on writers such as Roberto Bolaño situates Latin American literature within broader debates about modernity, race, and world literature.
Freja Ruby Flejsborg explores decolonial pedagogy in higher education in Latin America, with particular attention to how decolonial theory is enacted rather than merely declared, in institutional practice. Through an ongoing collaboration with the intercultural indigenous university Amawtay Wasi in Ecuador, she develops the concept of creative friction as a tool for thinking through epistemic difference, intercultural education, and the practical conditions of decolonial praxis.
This cluster invites partnerships with Latin American universities, indigenous educational communities, and researchers working on curriculum reform, epistemic justice, and the politics of knowledge.
