Beatriz Véliz Argueta

beatriz.veliz_argueta@uni-erfurt.de

Stipendiatin (Centre for Transcultural Studies / Perthes Collection)

Contact

Schloss Friedenstein, Pagenhaus, Raum 2.06

Visiting address

Forschungskolleg Transkulturelle Studien / Sammlung Perthes
Schloss Friedenstein – Pagenhaus
Schlossplatz 1
99867 Gotha

Biography

Beatriz Véliz Argueta is an interdisciplinary scholar who holds degrees in history, political science and international/global studies from universities across the world. Taking her home country – Guatemala – as a point of departure her work explores the construction of place (people and space) and the narratives built around these (dis)encounters in postcolonial nations. Her work rests at the intersection of history, cartography, materiality and photography in tracing the complex interplay of race and the built environment in shaping place. She graduated with honors from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in 2020.

Véliz Argueta is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Forschungskolleg Transkulturelle Studien/ Sammlung Perthes, Universität Erfurt, Germany (On leave). Previously, she was Visiting Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she co-founded the international Urban Photography Summer School. Currently, she is Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (2021 – 2022) at the College of Arts & Architecture, Pennsylvania State University, where she continues to conduct research on the history of indigenous strategies for negotiating and resisting colonization.

PhD Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

MA Global Studies, Freiburg (Germany) University of Kwazulu-Natal (South Africa) and Jawaharlal Nehru University (India)

Research interests

  • construction of place (people and space)
  • cross-cultural encounters
  • colonial, postcolonial, decolonial theory
  • urban and spatial theory
  • built environment and vernacular architecture
  • visual, material and photographic theory and practice
  • interdisciplinary and experimental research
  • multi-archival research projects

Research project

Bifurcated cartographies. Mapping Central America in the early Nineteenth Century. A cross-continental reading

In the early XIX century two mapping projects on opposite sides of the world started taking shape. One, led by Adolf Stieler in Gotha (Germany), with the ambition to map the whole world in a single work: the Hand-Atlas über alle Theile der Erde (1816 – 1831). The other, with more modest goals, attempting to define the contours of a newly independent nation in Central America: Atlas Guatemalteco (1831).

During that period Central America underwent profound changes shifting its political boundaries in an endless battle over people and territory. Bifurcated cartographies (BC) seeks to shed light into this process from a map-making cross continental reading. It examines the representation of Guatemala, and Central America, from a foreign and a native perspective. It seeks to highlight the cartographic making of the Other and the centrality of the cartographer as a spatio/ temporal translator in this process. Furthermore, the project aims to contribute to the understanding of maps as Objektbiographien and its influence in the forging of new imagined communities.

Image: America. Stielers Hand-Atlas No 41 (1816) © Collecting Perthes.

Selected Presentations

2022 (forthcoming)
“Mapping the Other: the cartographer as a spatio/temporal translator in early XIX century German cartography”. The International Society for the History of the Map, 12 – 13 May, 2022, Montevideo.

2017
“On Postcolonial practices and Decolonizing strategies. An introduction to A Global Dialogue” A Global Dialogue on the Everyday Production of the Postcolonial World and its Others, 10 – 12 May 2017, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin.

2016
“Reflections on Memory, Spaces of Conflict and Representation”, Introductory Lecture. “Memory, Photography and Place Symposium”. Centro de Informação Urbana de Lisboa (CIUL), Lisbon. 29 -31 January 2016.

Publications

  • Entangled Urban Narratives: The Making of Informal Colonial and Postcolonial Guatemala City. (forthcoming)
  • “The European Union and Central America: Negotiating an Interregional Agreement” Working Paper Series on      Comparative Regional Integration Studies. United Nations University (2008).
  • “SICA's Interstate Bargaining: A Field trip” Regional Integration Observer, Vol. 2, No. 1, Zentrum für Europäische Integrationsforschung (ZEI) (2008).
  • “Benefits and Risks of an Association Agreement between the EU and SICA” in Global Voices on Regional     Integration, eds. Ariane Kösler and Martin Zimmek, Zentrum für Europäische Integrationsforschung (ZEI) C 176, 2007, 193 – 202.