College: Corpus Christi                      

Email: wgh23@cam.ac.uk                   

Supervisor: Prof Maite Conde and Prof Chris Young

Research Topic: Globality, Modernity, Identity and Uruguayan Football’s Generación Olímpica

Biography

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, and his PhD project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Open-Oxford-Cambridge Doctoral Training Programme.

Research     

Will's project focuses on football in Uruguay during the first decades of the 20th 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 analyses three key events – the 1924 and 1928 Olympic Football Tournaments, and the inaugural FIFA World Cup, held in Montevideo in 1930 – which he positions 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 aims 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.

Publications

• 2020. “Monos”. Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana 49 (2): 44-45. https://chasquirll.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Chasqui-Reviews-November-2020.pdf
• 2021. “Kicking Off: Violence, Honour, Identity and Masculinity in Argentinian Football Chants”. International Review for the Sociology of Sport. https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690220988651
• 2023. “‘La victoria de nuestro equipo ha sido 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. (publication forthcoming).

Conference Papers

• “Uruguay at the 1924 Olympic Games”, at the Society of Latin American Studies (SLAS) Conference, Bath. 21st April 2022.
• “‘The Victory of our Team has been a Victory for Uruguay as a Country’: Style, National Identity, and Intercultural Encounter at the 1924 Olympic Football Tournament”, at the North American Society for Sports History (NASSH) Conference, Washington, D.C. 28th May 2023.

Teaching at Cambridge

• SP1: Introduction to the Language, Literatures and Cultures of the Spanish-speaking World (2023-2024)
• SPB2: Translation from Spanish (2023-2024)
• PG4: Lusophone Culture, History and Politics (2023-2024)
• Undergraduate Final Year dissertation supervisor (2023-2024)

Organised Events

• Organising committee member, Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) International Conference, 18th-20th September 2023, Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford.

Scholarships and Awards        

• AA Parker Sessional Prize (UCL, 2014)
• Eva Grunwald Memorial Prize (UCL, 2014)
• Alcalá-Galiano Prize (UCL, 2017)
• Violet Hall Prize (UCL, 2017)
• Cambridge UK Masters Scholarship (University of Cambridge, 2019-2020)
• OOC AHRC DTP Studentship (University of Cambridge, 2021-2024)
• Simón Bolivar Fund (University of Cambridge, 2022)

Other Roles

• MMLL SpanPort graduate representative, September 2023 – present.

Media

• Appearance on BBC Radio Berkshire, 24th November 2022.
• ‘Are football chants naturalising violence in Argentina?’, The Football and Society Podcast, 1st August 2022, link.

Research interests

• Popular culture
• Modernity and modernisation
• Globalisation
• History of sport
• National identity