Beatriz Marín-Aguilera is Research Fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Research Associate at St. John’s College in the University of Cambridge (England, UK). She has conducted fieldwork in Spain and in Antigua and Barbuda, and has participated in fieldwork projects in Cyprus, Italy, and Spain. A record of her main publications can be consulted here: http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/directory/bm499.

Her research interests include postcolonial theory in archaeology, the archaeology of colonialism using comparative perspectives, and the analysis of Otherness discourses. More specifically, she is interested in the politics of the body and the construction (and reconstruction) of memory in colonial situations, especially in the western Mediterranean, in the Southern Cone, in the Caribbean, and recently, in Ethiopia.

Beatriz is currently the PI of the project ‘Colonising bodies: laws and dressing habits in Chile in the 15th-19th century’, funded by the McDonald Institute Fund. The project focuses on the study of the colonial control of bodies in the General Captaincy of Chile throughout the 16th to the 19th centuries. It particularly addresses how the Spanish colonial discourse was established, perpetuated, challenged, and transformed through the use of specific clothing and textiles, and how it intermingled with gender, class, and racial hierarchies of power.

She is also a member of the research team working on the project ‘Material culture, colonialism, and gender in Ethiopia’ led by Almudena Hernando. Beatriz’s research is centred on the history of colonial dynamics suffered by the Gumuz and the Dats’in in the Sudan-Ethiopian border region, especially regarding resistance and hybrid practices through the use of material culture.