Notes on contributors

Pablo Bradbury holds a PhD in History from the University of Liverpool, writing his thesis on the emergence and mobilisation of liberation Christianity in Argentina, and particularly its political responses to state terrorism. His research more broadly focuses on left-wing political cultures and social movements in Latin America’s Cold War, exploring religion, international solidarity and strategies towards state repression. He currently teaches at the University of Greenwich.

Juan Mario Díaz-Arévalo is an interdisciplinary researcher, with much of his work focusing on the interlocking challenges of conflict, violence and social injustice through the practice of participatory action research. He is a research fellow at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Sheffield. He completed a BPhil in Philosophy and Letters and a BA in Theology, followed by an MA in Latin American Literature. In 2017, he completed his PhD in History at the University of Roehampton, London. He is currently working on an intellectual history of sociologist Orlando Fals Borda.

Natalie Gasparowicz received her PhD from Duke University (USA). Her dissertation explores Catholic debates over sex, marriage and pleasure, following the creation of the newly invented birth control pill, in late twentieth-century Mexico. She is a recipient of the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship and the American Catholic Historical Association’s John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award.

Niall H. D. Geraghty is Associate Professor in Latin American Cultural Studies at University College London. Niall’s first book was The Polyphonic Machine: Capitalism, Political Violence, and Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Literature (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). He has published articles and book chapters on literature and film from Latin America, with a particular interest in memory, urban culture and religion in the region. He is currently working on a project involving a radical re-examination of the work of Argentine artist León Ferrari (1920–2013), which also explores the interrelations between politics and religion in twentieth-century Argentina, and the potential correlations between contemporary philosophy and liberation theology.

Anna Grimaldi is a lecturer in international development at the University of Leeds. In 2023, she published her first book, Brazil and the Transnational Human Rights Movement, 1964–1985 (Anthem Press). Currently, her work focuses on the pedagogy of Cold War Latin American History, including a recent project to study the far right in the region. Her work is inspired by solidarity in its myriad forms.

Fernando Luiz Lara is a Professor of Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. His recent publications includes edited volumes on Spatial Concepts for Decolonizing the Americas (Cambridge Scholars, 2022) and Decolonizing the Spatial History of the Americas (Texas Center for American Architecture and Design, 2021), and the books Street Matters: A Critical History of Twentieth-Century Urban Policy in Brazil (with Ana Paula Koury, University of Pittsburgh, 2022), Excepcionalidad del Modernismo Brasileño (Romano Guerra, 2019) and Modern Architecture in Latin America: Art, Technology and Utopia (with Luis Carranza, Texas Press, 2015).

Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo is the Earley Associate Professor of Catholic and Latin American Studies and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. A constructive feminist theologian rooted in the Catholic tradition, her teaching and research places Christian theology in conversation with human resilience and resistance to vulnerability and violence, especially in contexts of social injustice and ecological degradation. Gandolfo’s most recent publications include Ecomartyrdom in the Americas: Living and Dying for Our Common Home (Orbis, 2023) and the co-authored book Re-membering the Reign of God: The Decolonial Witness of El Salvador’s Church of the Poor (Lexington, 2022).

Patrick O’Hare is a Senior Researcher and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of St Andrews. He received his PhD in Social Anthropology (Cambridge, 2017) and has held research positions at the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Surrey, conducting research in Uruguay, Mexico, Argentina and the UK on themes relating to labour, waste, recycling and plastics. He is the author of Rubbish Belongs to the Poor: Hygienic Enclosure and the Waste Commons (Pluto Press, 2022), co-author of Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (Texas University Press, 2022) and co-editor of Circular Economies in an Unequal World (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Ely Orrego Torres was born and raised in Chile and is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois). Currently, she is a visiting PhD student at the Centre de Recherches Internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po-Paris. She was a Northwestern Buffett Global Impacts Graduate Fellow, a Social Science Research Council Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellow (SSRC-Fetzer Institute) and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Critical Theory. Previously, she earned a BA in Political Science from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile and an MA in Philosophy and Contemporary Thought from Diego Portales University. Her research agenda intertwines political theory and international relations to address questions on religion and politics in the global context.

Martha Zechmeister CJ was born in 1956 in Austria and studied theology in Vienna, where she completed her doctoral thesis in 1985 and habilitation thesis in 1997. She was Professor of Fundamental Theology at the University of Passau, Germany, from 1999 to 2008. Since 2008, she has been Professor of Systematic Theology at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas, San Salvador (El Salvador), and since 2012 has directed the master’s programme in Latin American Theology. She is also responsible for the ‘Casa Dean Brackley’, a residence of scholarship students from extremely poor areas. Her main research interests include political theology, Latin American liberation theology and Ignatian spirituality.