Dr. Paula Park is Assistant Professor for Spanish and Latinamerican Studies at Wesleyan University and an expert for Filipino literature, especially around 1900. She is going to do research at Bielefeld and the SFB supported by the Humboldt Research Fellowship for Postdoctoral Researchers. The title of her research project on which she will be working at the SFB for six months in 2019 is: "Latin America in the Philippines: Remapping Intercoloniality Across the Hispanic Pacific".

The cooperation originates in the collaboration with SFB subproject A03 and the joint research questions and geographical focus areas.

Paula Park's research explores literary, cultural, and diplomatic links between the Philippines and Latin America from 1898 to 1964, focusing on their shared resistance against American expansionism, their strategic defense of Hispanic heritage, and their mutual sense of familiarity across the Pacific.

While 1898 signals the development of an anticolonial sentiment was shared by Filipino and Hispanic Caribbean intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, 1964 refers to the fourth centenary of the beginning of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, the first commercial link between Asia and the Americas, as well as the most important intercolonial link during the Spanish colonial era.

During her six months at Bielefeld she will specifically be working at examining the circulation of literary productions from Latin America to the Philippines during the first decades of the twentieth century, and comparing the transpacific framings of the Philippines of three historical studies produced between 1902 and 1972.