Dr Michela Coletta is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow in Global History. She is writing a global history of ideas and cultures of "living well" with a focus on Andean and Amazonian epistemologies. She is also Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Warwick. Michela received her PhD in Latin American History from University College London. She has previously taught at King's College London, University College London and at the University of Bristol. She has held a Marie Curie Early Career Fellowship at the Universidad 'Pablo de Olavide' in Seville, Spain, a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of London, and an Associate Research Fellowship at UCL Institute of the Americas. She continues to collaborate with CLACS as Associate Fellow.

Michela's monograph Decadent Modernity: Civilisation and Latinidad in Spanish America, 1880-1920  (LUP, 2018 [paperback 2020]) shows the relevance of cultural frameworks of modernity in the emergence of Latin America as a geo-political region. She has contributed book chapters on the origins of degeneration theory in the medical and sociological discourse of late-nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America (La Biblioteca Valenciana/King’s College London, 2007) and on ideas of race and immigration in Chile and Argentina (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). In her work bridging the fields of modernity studies, environmental humanities and decolonial studies, Michela approaches the history and politics of the environment in Latin America from the perspective of cultural and intellectual history. She is co-author of the chapter ‘Whose Natures? Whose Knowledges? An Introduction to Epistemic Politics and Eco-Ontologies in Latin America’, published in the volume Provincialising Nature: Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Politics of the Environment in Latin America (ILAS Book Series, 2016), of which she is also co-editor. The book can be downloaded for free here. Among her most recent  publications are: the co-authored paper Counter-Hegemonic Narratives and the Politics of Plurality: Problematising Global Environmental Governance from Latin America through the Case of Bolivia (2018); a co-edited special section on Race and Geography in Latin American History for BLAR (2019), which includes her article on Imagined Races in Twentieth-Century Argentina; the co-authored article Latin American readings of Gramsci and the Bolivian indigenous nationalist state  (2020); the chapter 'An Ecology of Absences: Remapping North-South Border Narratives in Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive' (Routledge, forthcoming 2022).

Project title:
PAST FUTURES: Long-time thinking in South American 'living well' epistemologies