Dr Marta Magalhães Wallace

I hold an MPhil and PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Previously, I read History (BA Hons) at Lancaster University, where I took an interest in the history of ideas as well as in imperial and postcolonial contexts. My MPhil work built on the latter to look at the way race, gender and sexuality intersected to produce different political subjects and distinct exclusions, in two major cities in contemporary Northeast Brazil. My PhD research followed from this, looking at the transformation of Salvador (BA), Brazil’s colonial capital and key port city in the lucrative global trade in persons and imperial goods, into a pivotal UNESCO World heritage site. I was interested in looking at the claims to exceptional cultural and human value articulated by state officials and heritage stakeholders from the perspective of those most affected by the interventions which followed the city’s acquisition of UNESCO’s World Heritage status. This, in turned, led me to focus on the way a perceived increase in violence and violent crime has reconfigured public life in the city.  

I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, where I convened and taught the MPhil course on the Anthropology of Latin America and carried out extensive graduate supervision. During my time at CLAS, I wrote a series of articles based on my doctoral and postdoctoral research, which expanded on my previous work on violence and looked at the devastating effects that a growth in drug consumption in the city (especially crack cocaine) has had in both its public life and in the quotidian of some of its most vulnerable communities. At the same time, I also started to look back at some of my longstanding interests in late colonial and postcolonial European history and published a long (commissioned) article on memory, material culture and identity in contemporary Portugal.

Recently, I started to do research on mental health in contemporary Europe, with an emphasis on depression and anxiety. That research, which has expanded to look at the complex relation between mental health/care and political, economic and environmental change, is ongoing.