Dr Oliver Wilson-Nunn

Dr Oliver Wilson-Nunn

Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 3213
Email
own1@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
Room 119
Location
Buchanan
Office hours
Tuesday 11-12, Wednesday 11-12

 

Biography

Dr Wilson-Nunn is Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies. Following a BA in Modern and Medieval Languages (2019) and an MPhil in Latin American Studies (2020), he passed his PhD in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2024. Between 2023 and 2026 he was Isaac Newton Junior Research Fellow at Robinson College, University of Cambridge.

Teaching

Since 2021, Dr Wilson-Nunn has taught on Latin American literature, film, and politics, as well as Spanish language and translation, across undergraduate and postgraduate levels. 

At the University of St Andrews, he teaches on several modules in Spanish language and Spanish-speaking culture at sub-honours and honours levels.

Research areas

At its core, Dr Wilson-Nunn's interdisciplinary research explores how Latin American culture responds to the state. With a special interest in film and literature, his work asks what it means to be critical of, complicit with, or indeed part of the state in a region marked by complex histories of extreme state violence, state-led projects of social justice, and creative forms of activism beyond the state. His research has been published, in English and Spanish, in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Modern Language Review, and Bulletin of Latin American Research.

His first monograph, Capturing Carceral Critique: Prison, State and Cinema in Argentina, 1930s-2010s, will be published in 2027 with University of Pittsburgh Press.

He is currently working on two interdisciplinary research projects. One focuses on contemporary documentary film from Argentina to ask how artists, activists, and lawyers make critical and creative sense of the proliferation of legal process. This covers topics ranging from environmental justice to feminist activism and the contested concept of lawfare among political elites. The second project explores the understated relationship between environmental harm and imprisonment across Latin America, covering topics that range from prison quarries to climate change. Engaging with literary, cinematic, artistic, scientific, and bureaucratic texts from across the region, this research investigates the intersections between state violence on land and body.

Selected publications

 

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