Peter Wade

Dr Peter Wade (research profile)

I did a PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University (1981-1985), with 16 months of fieldwork in Colombia, exploring ethnic relations and ideas about racial difference. I then held a Research Fellowship at Queens’ College, Cambridge, and did another 14 months of fieldwork in Colombia, focusing on black migrants to the city of Medellín. In 1988, I became a lecturer in the University of Liverpool and, in 1995, in the University of Manchester, where I am now professor. Since 1988, I have done several spells of fieldwork in Colombia, looking at the black social movement and constitutional reform, and tracing the social history of Colombian popular music in the twentieth century and its connections with ideas about nation and race. In the last few years, I have been exploring the construction of nature, biology, genetics and culture in ideas about race, and have recently started the current project on anti-racism.

My publications include Blackness and Race Mixture (1993),  Race and Ethnicity in Latin America (2nd edition, 2010), Race, Nature and Culture (2002), and Race and Sex in Latin America (2009), Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (2000), Race, Nature and Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (2002), “Rethinking Mestizaje: Ideology and Lived Experience” (Journal of Latin American Studies 37, 2005), “Afro-Latin Studies: Reflections on the Field” (Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies 1, 2006).

From 2010 to 2013, I directed a project, funded by the ESRC and the Leverhulme Trust, on “Race, genomics and mestizaje (mixture) in Latin America: a comparative approach”. A book from the project, co-edited with Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo and Ricardo Ventura Santos, is titled Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Duke University Press, 2014). I recently held a British Academy Wolfson Research Professorship (2013-2016) to develop my work on race and genomics: key products of this have been two books: Race: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Degrees of Mixture, Degrees of Freedom: Genomics, Multiculturalism and Race in Latin America (Duke, 2017).

More recently, I have directed a project on art and anti-racism in Latin America and participated in a project on comics and race in Latin America.