Contact
Claudia Leal is an associate professor in the department of history at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota, Colombia. She holds a PhD in geography from the University of California Berkeley and is a founding member of SOLCHA, the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History. At the Universidad de los Andes she helped create and, for the last three years, has also directed a master’s program in geography, which emphasizes the relationship between people and their environments from a social science perspective. Her research has focused on both the formation and the present state of peasant societies in rainforest environments, and on the role of racial categorization in shaping Latin American societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
RCC Research Project: Landscapes of Freedom: The Pacific Lowlands of Colombia, 1850–1930 (pdf, 16 KB)
Film Interview with Claudia Leal
Interview on the RCC blog Seeing the Woods: Five Minutes with a Fellow: Claudia Leal
Selected publications
- Historias sobre raza y nación en América Latina. Bogota: Ediciones Uniandes, 2010. Edited with Carl Langebaek.
- “Usos del concepto raza en Colombia.” In Debates sobre ciudadanía y políticas raciales en las Américas negras, edited by Claudia Mosquera Rosero-Labbé, Agustín Laó-Montes, and César Rodríguez, 21-38. Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, sede Bogotá, CES, IDCARAN, sede Medellín, Universidad de los Andes, 2010.
- “La Compañía Minera Chocó Pacífico y el auge del platino en Colombia, 1897-1930.” Historia Crítica número especial (November 2009): 150-64.
- “Disputas por tagua y minas. Recursos naturales y propiedad territorial en el Pacífico colombiano, 1870-1930.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología 44 (2008): 409-38.
- “Un Puerto en la selva. Naturaleza y raza en la creación de la ciudad de Tumaco, 1860-1940.” Historia Crítica 30 (July-December 2005): 39-65.