Ana Maria Otero-Cleves
Lecturer in the History of Latin America

Profile

Biography

BA (Universidad de los Andes), MA (York), PhD (Oxford)

Ana María Otero-Cleves is Lecturer in the History of Latin America. Born and raised in Colombia, she joined the department in 2023, having previously held the position of Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia). Otero-Cleves specialises in the history of nineteenth-century Colombia and Latin America, with a particular interest in the history of consumption, global history, and legal culture. Her book Plebeian Consumers: Global Connections, Local Trade and Foreign Goods in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), was winner of the Toynbee First Book Manuscript Workshop Competition (2022).

Ana María is also an enthusiastic public historian and co-founder the public history initiative Historias para lo que Viene (Histories for what’s to come).  Historias para lo que Viene is a collaborative project in which historians, public humanists, and communities affected by the Colombian armed conflict come together to aid the process of peacebuilding in Colombia, through public history workshops and other collective projects, including #ClasealaCalle. (@clasealacalle).

Research

Overview

Ana María’s research focuses on the consumption, history of capitalism from the global South, and legal culture. Her educational backgrounds in both law and history inform her research interests. Ana’s previous publications had looked at global interconnectivity in the nineteenth century by focusing on consumption of foreign commodities in Latin America by peasants, day workers, formerly enslaved people, market women, and small landholders. Her publications include, “Foreign Machetes and Cheap Cotton Cloth: Popular Consumers and Imported Commodities in Nineteenth-Century Colombia.” Hispanic American Historical Review 97, n. ° 3 (2017): 423-256, awarded the prize for Best Article - Nineteenth Century Section by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and 'This mixed species of the population will consume’: Atlantic expectations about Spanish American consumers on the Age of Revolutions, 1780-1831’, Journal of Latin American Studies (2019).  

Her current project called The textiles she bought: Microhistory, Historical Imagination, and Global Commodities in Mid-Nineteenth Century Latin America, aims to reconstruct the life of a formerly enslaved woman in the second half of the nineteenth century from a “fragmented archive; just a few years after the final abolition of slavery in Colombia. 

Ana María welcomes inquiries from potential Master and PhD students with related interests.

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00171I Republican Experiments: Race and Popular Politics in Latin America (1820-1910)
• HIS00133H Travel

Postgraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00174M Goods, Ideas, and People: Modern Latin America from a Global Perspective (1810-1910)

Publications