Dr Oliver Wilson-Nunn
- Isaac Newton Junior Research Fellow
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- Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Raised Faculty Building University of Cambridge Sidgwick Avenue Cambridge CB3 9DA United Kingdom
About
Oliver is an Isaac Newton Junior Research fellow at Robinson College. He specialises in Latin American film and literature, with a particular interest in the contested relationship between cultural production and the law. He is currently working on a book project based on his doctoral research, provisionally entitled Critical Carceral Fictions: Imprisonment and the Modern State in Argentine Cinema. Alongside this, his postdoctoral research explores how contemporary documentary film from Argentina has responded to and participated in legal conflicts. Drawing on documentary studies, environmental humanities, and legal geography, this interdisciplinary project engages with topics ranging from river-based disputes to the judicialisation of bodily autonomy and trials against military generals accused of committing mass human-rights abuses.
Oliver is the lead organizer of the event ‘Creative Interventions in Prison and De-carceral Activism: Sharing Knowledge and Practice’, February 21–22, 2025, supported by the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS). In 2022–23, he was co-coordinator of the Cambridge Hispanic and Lusophone Research Seminar Series. He was also on the organizing committees of XVIII Congreso Internacional ALEPH, ‘Formas depensar el cuerpo en las culturas hispánicas’, August 22–24, 2022 and Postgraduates in Latin American Studies (PILAS) Conference, ‘Repair, Resistance, and Resilience in Latin America’, July 7–8, 2022. In 2021–22, he was president of the Postgraduates in Latin American Studies (PILAS), the postgraduate affiliate of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS).
For his article ‘Pedagogy Behind and Beyond Bars: Critical Perspectives on Prison Education in Contemporary Documentary Film from Argentina’, Oliver was awarded the Latin American Studies Association Film Studies Section Best Graduate Student Essay Award Published in 2020–22 and an honorable mention in the LARR-University Florida Article Award 2023.
Research
Research interests:
Latin American film and literature; legal humanities; cultural criminology; environmental humanities; spatial theory; documentary studies; early cinema studies; prison abolitionism and minimalism.
Published works:
Selected Conference papers
‘Relocating the Documentary Geographies of Law: Film and the Judicialisation of River-Based Conflict in Argentina’. Visible Evidence XXX, Monash University, Melbourne. December 17–20, 2024.
‘Conflicting Conceptions of Justice: The Place of Impunidad in Anti-Punitive Thinking from Argentina’. Society for Latin American Studies Conference, University of Amsterdam. July 1–3, 2024.
‘La difícil democratización del placer: Sexo, verdad y venganza en el cine carcelario de mujeres de la posdictadura argentina’. Latin American Studies Association Conference, ‘Reacción y resistencia: Imaginar futuros posibles en las Américas’, Bogotá. June 12–15, 2024.
‘La cinematografización de la cárcel: cruces transmediales entre cine, periodismo y literatura’. IX Congreso AsAECA (Asociación Argentina de Estudios sobre Cine y Audiovisual), Buenos Aires. March 13–16, 2024.
‘Recalibrating Human Rights in Penal Institutions in Contemporary Argentine Cinema’, in the panel ‘Institutional Practices and Discourses in Argentine Film, 1930–present’. Latin American Studies Association Conference, ‘América Latina y el caribe: Pensar, Representar y Luchar por los Derechos’, Vancouver. May 25, 2023.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming, 2025: ‘Right, Responsibility, and Resistance: Mapping the Reproductive Labor of Carceral Motherhood in Leonera (2008)’, Hispanic Research Journal.
Forthcoming: ‘Las temporalidades del cuerpo nacional: la organización de los cuerpos humanos y no humanos en el cine científico argentino de los 1920’, in Horizontes del cuerpo en las literaturas iberoamericanas: de la Edad Media al presente, ed. by Carlos Iglesias-Crespo and Sergio Martínez Rey (Madrid: Sílex Ediciones).
Forthcoming: ‘Federico Pous, Eventos carcelarios. Imaginario revolucionario y subjetivación política en América Latina’ (2022), Hispanófila (book review).
‘Sexo, drogas y ¿cárcel?: subjetividades modernas en Intimidades de una cualquiera (1974)’, Ñawi, vol. 8, no. 2 (2024), pp. 107–123.
Nicolás, Oliver Wilson-Nunn, Joey Whitfield, Lucy Bell. ‘Silence and Punish: Forgetting as an Apparatus of Torture. Deconstruction, Solidarity, and Popular Education as Modes of Resistance’, Prison Service Journal, 272 (May 2024), pp. 50–58.
‘Pedagogy Behind and Beyond Bars: Critical Perspectives on Prison Education in Contemporary Documentary Film from Argentina’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 57, no. 4 (2022), pp. 903–921.
‘Writing Between Evasion and Escape: Prison Writing and Escapism in Reinaldo Arenas’s Arturo, la estrella más brillante’, Modern Language Review, vol. 117, no.4 (October 2022). pp. 607–623.
Teaching and supervision
Teaching interests:
Oliver lectures, teaches, and supervises across a variety of undergraduate papers for the Section of Spanish and Portuguese, as well as on the MPhil courses in Latin American Studies and Film Studies. In 2022, he was nominated for a Cambridge Student Union Student-Led teaching award.
Oliver welcomes enquiries from prospective Year Abroad, fourth-year Optional Dissertation, and MPhil students in Latin American culture, especially in areas that align with his research interests.