Member Profiles

I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Royal Holloway, University of London. I am interested in the ecological transformation of tropical cities. Specifically, I am trying to reconstruct the ecological and social consequences involved in the nineteenth-century modernisation of Latin American cities when parks and other green spaces were established as symbols of modernity and progress. In my investigation, I have shown how the modernisation of cities such as Medellín and Bogotá in Colombia triggered a transatlantic movement of plants while creating emergent human-plant relationships not seen hitherto in the Andes. As a biologist and human geographer, I integrate historical sources from natural Science Museums, herbariums and botanical gardens with research in historical archives and libraries to obtain a polyphonic approach towards the role of non-humans in the creation of Latin American cities. Thus, my work is framed within the more-than-human geographies with a specific interest in the historical change in the human-plant relationships in tropical environments of Andean countries.