Gabe Paquette, professor of history and Dean of the Robert D. Clark Honors College, has a new article with the prestigious Historical Journal (UK), “The “Parry Report’ (1965) and the Establishment of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom.” This article deals with the geopolitical and academic factors that gave rise to Latin American Studies as an established discipline in the United Kingdom.

View the full text article and learn more about this topic at Cambridge Core.

Article Abstract:

This article examines the origins of the ‘Parry Report’ (1965), the implementation of which led to the massive expansion of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom. Drawing on material from several archives, the article argues that the Report was the product of a peculiar geopolitical conjuncture—decolonization, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Britain’s rejection from the European Economic Community—that prompted the Foreign Office to convene a group of academics (and selected others) from institutions then in the process of formalizing links with US-based private foundations. It seeks to show how extramural and intramural factors, geopolitics and academic politics, combined to generate an interdisciplinary area study that survived long after the conditions that had given rise to its genesis had disappeared.

Gabe Paquette is a Professor of History, with a secondary appointment in International Studies. His research focuses on aspects of European, Latin American, and International History. He has co-edited a new special issue of the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies (vol. 24, no. 2), entitled “New directions in the political history of the Spanish-Atlantic world, c. 1750–1850.”