Dr Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, Reader in the Department of Hispanic Studies, has just won a 12-month Leverhulme fellowship, to conduct a research project entitled ‘The Armed Forces and State-Building in Post-Colonial Peru, 1800-1860’.
Natalia’s project explores the role the armed forces played in the process of state-building in the post-colonial period. It asks how this corporate body emerged as a strengthened institution after the wars of independence and how it shaped the newly emerging state. Most studies, concerned with the fractious nature of the new polity, have paid very little attention to this institution, which monopolised for its members all the positions of political power. Investigating the armed forces as an institution, her study will shed light on the fraught process of state-building in a post-colonial society not just in Peru but beyond.
The award will cover for teaching, research assistance and travel.
For more details of the Leverhume Trust, please see the website here:
www.leverhulme.ac.uk