Professor in Latin American History, Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
Matthew is a historian of Latin America from Independence to the present day. He worked for many years on Simón Bolívar and the independence of South America from colonial rule, focussing particularly on the foreign adventurers who took part in the Wars of Independence in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador and the lives they made there in the post-war period.
He has since researched the history of sports in the region: his book, From Frontiers to Football: An Alternative History of Latin America since 1800 (2014) is a general history of Latin America’s engagement with the world, which gives equal importance to sport alongside diplomacy, and popular culture alongside commerce. He is currently completing a monograph on the history of sports in South America between the codification of Association Football in 1863 and the first World Cup being held in Uruguay in 1930.
Matthew collaborated on the Quipu Project, a transmedia documentary about the unconsented sterilizations of hundreds of thousands of Peruvians in the 1990s and the Peace Festival project, looking at creative methodologies for unearthing hidden war stories in Colombia and Peru. He is currently the Principal Investigator on Bringing Memories in from the Margins, which works with grassroots memory projects and the transitional justice system in Colombia.
Recent publications:
- Brown, M, 2019, ‘Translating the Rules of Football in South America, 1863-1914’. Estudos Históricos, vol 32, pp. 569-89.
- Brown, M & Tucker, K, 2017, ‘Unconsented Sterilisation, Participatory Story-Telling, and Digital Counter-Memory in Peru’. Antipode, vol 49., pp. 1186-1203.
- Brown, M, 2015, ‘ The global history of Latin America’. Journal of Global History. Vol 10:3, pp.365-86.