Dr Ailsa Peate

I am Lecturer in Hispanic and Museum Studies, and co-Course Leader on the MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture and Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture with Professional Experience. Previously, I worked as Senior Teaching Associate in Spanish at Lancaster University, and more recently I held the post of Doctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded Standard Grant project, Memory, Victims, and Representation of the Colombian Conflict at the University of Liverpool, working with Colombian museums, memory spaces, and NGOs to create participatory arts events and to question museum practices as regards gender representation in light of the country's conflict.

I undertook my undergraduate and MA studies at the University of Glasgow and obtained my PhD from the University of Liverpool with a focus on sex, gender, and genre in contemporary Mexican and Cuban detecitve fiction. During my PhD I held roles as Research Assistant in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, and as Research Associate in the cross-institutional Institute of Cultural Capital (the University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University), as well as teaching advanced Spanish on the University of Liverpool's Continuing Education programme.

My research focuses on representations of sex and gender in Mexican and Cuban detective fiction, Mexico's narcoculture, power structures, and the consequences of gore capitalism (Valencia, 2010) for women, and curatorial and ethical approaches to visibilising women's narratives in Mexican and Colombian museums as well as in the Colombian diaspora in the UK.

My research primarily focuses on gender and sexuality across a variety of cultural representations in Latin America, including in Mexican popular culture, particularly artistic expression, the aesthetic of the buchona, and the cultural significance of narcocorridos and telenovelas. My forthcoming monograph, to be published with Liverpool University Press and provisionally entitled Subverting Sex, Gender, and Genre in Mexican and Cuban Detective Fiction, aims to deepen the understanding of detective fiction in Cuba and Mexico and to provide the reader with new analyses of representations of gender and sexualities. My other areas of research focus on the representation of women in museums in Colombia and Mexico, two countries affected by feminicide and recent and ongoing violent conflicts, in order to outline where and how women's voices can be incorporated into arts institutions practices and represented by memory spaces in the two countries. I am a member of the Red de Investigación de Género, Patrimonio y Memoria (Gender, Heritage and Memory Research Network), where I work with museum practitioners and students within the field of Museum Studies analysing state-sponsored memorials and their relationship to representations of sexual violence.

In 2021, I was awarded a Researcher Development Award by the University of Westminster in order to undertake further investigations at Mexican museums on the representation of women in museum and gallery displays across a variety of memory and cultural spaces in the country.

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.