Eduardo Posada-Carbo

Eduardo Posada-Carbo is Professor of the History and Politics of Latin America in Oxford, and William Golding Senior Research Fellow at Brasenose College.  He completed an MPhil in Latin American Studies and a DPhil in Modern History in Oxford.  He has been been visiting professor and fellow in several universities, including Brown, Chicago and Notre Dame in the United States.

The project

Title: Times of Crisis, Times of Hope: The Global History of Democracy

"Times of Crises, Times of Hope: A Global History of Democracy proposes to explore a decentred narrative of the history of democracy through a display of treasures mainly from the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, accompanied by materials also stored at the Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Colleges but also, if possible, fom other libraries in the United Kingdom and Europe.  Here the French collections in the archives and libraries of Paris will be of great value.  The project proposes to do so in the context of the current global crisis of democracy, highlighting previous significant crises in its long history from ancient times through to the present. The exhibition will be premised on revisionist views, which tell the history of democracy from global perspectives, away from hitherto dominant Eurocentric and diffusionist approaches.  An example of such perspectives is John Keane’s The Life and Death of Democracy (Simon & Schuster, 2009) published originally in English and translated into other 7 languages (Portuguese, Chinese, Greek, Korean, Spanish, Arabic and Japanese). https://www.johnkeane.net/portfolio_page/life-and-death-of-democracy/ An Oxford-based project (‘Re-Imagining Democracy’, led by Joanna Innes and Mark Philp), also takes a non-diffusionist approach towards the history of democracy."

Selective bibliography

• (With Andrew Robertson), eds, The Oxford Handbook of Revolutionary Elections in the Americas, 1810-1910 (Oxford University Press, 2026).
• (With Iván Jaksić), eds, The Political Thought of Nineteenth-Century Spanish America (Cambridge University Press, to be published in April 2026)
• ‘Vaivenes ciudadanos y cultura electoral en Colombia, 1854-1905’, in Margarita Garrido et al, eds., Historias de lo Político en Colombia. Vol 2.  De república a nación, 1853-1903 (Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, 2025), pp 217-45.
• (With Joanna Innes and Mark Philp), eds., Re-Imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1770s-1870s (Oxford University Press New York, 2023)
• (With José Antonio Aguilar and Eduardo Zimmermann), ‘The Early Adoption of Universal Male Suffrage, 1810–1853, Past & Present, 256:1 (August 2022) , pp. 165-202.