Position(s):
Assistant Professor of Spanish, Gonville & Caius College
Director of Studies, Emmanuel College
Department/Section:
Spanish & Portuguese
Centre of Latin American Studies
Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
Email address:
About:
Will graduated with First Class Honours in French and Spanish from University College London in 2017, during which he studied at the ENS de Lyon and the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago. At UCL, he was awarded the AA Parker Sessional Prize, the Eva Grunwald Memorial Prize, the Alcalá-Galiano Prize, and the Violet Hall Prize. Following his undergraduate studies, he worked as a teacher in Québec, Canada before completing the MPhil in Latin American Studies at Cambridge in 2020, for which he gained a distinction. His MPhil studies were supported by a Cambridge UK Masters Scholarship. His PhD project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Programme and was completed in the Summer of 2025. He currently teaches across several modules for the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, the Faculty of History and the Centre for Latin American Studies.
Research:
Will's research interests are broadly in the history and culture of Latin American sport and its imbrication with social, political and intellectual processes across the region. His doctoral project focussed on football in Uruguay during the first decades of the twentieth century, using the sport as a lens to examine questions of modernity, globalisation, mass culture and identity at a crucial moment in the formation of the Uruguayan nation-state. More specifically, he analysed three key events – the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Football Tournaments, and the inaugural FIFA World Cup, held in Montevideo in 1930 – which he positioned as spectacular ‘contact zones’, essential for Uruguay’s attempts at nation-branding abroad, and the construction of a progressive state nationalism at home. In popular and academic histories of football, these tournaments have been drastically overlooked, and thus he also aimed to demonstrate that, while football was essential to the invention of modern Uruguay, Uruguay in turn was also central to the sport’s emergence as the hyperglobal cultural object it is today. Will has been interviewed about his work by several podcasts and the BBC and currently convenes a public seminar series in Cambridge: ‘Footnotes’.
Research interests:
Popular culture; Modernity and modernisation; Globalisation and global culture; History of sport; National identity
Published Works:
2024. “‘Una Victoria para el Uruguay como país’: Style, National Identity, and Intercultural Encounter at the 1924 Olympic Football Tournament”. Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 42 (1): 53-74. Link.
2024. “Uruguay, Football and Global Stardom” in Caroline Vout and Christopher Young (eds), Paris 1924: Sport, Art and the Body. Cambridge: Paul Holberton Publishing: 81-93.
2021. “Kicking Off: Violence, Honour, Identity and Masculinity in Argentinian Football Chants”. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 57 (1): 34-53. Link.
2020. “Review of Monos”. Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 49 (2): 44-45. Link.
Teaching at Cambridge:
T17: Modern Latin America: 1780 to the Present
Year Abroad Project Supervisor
SPA3: Introduction to Hispanic Literature (ab initio)
SP5: Latin American Culture and History
SPC1: Translation from and into Spanish
SPB2: Translation from Spanish into English
PG4: Lusophone Culture, History and Politics
SP1: Introduction to the Language, Literatures and Cultures of the Spanish-speaking World
The Politics of Representation in Latin American Visual Culture (MPhil in Latin American Studies)
