Paradise Lost Documentary Screening with Professor and Director Claudia Leal

Paradise Lost by Pablo Mejía and Claudia Leal (A Orillas del Duda, 40 mins)

Screening (in Spanish with subtitles in English) following a discussion with Claudia Leal, professor, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, and visiting professor, Stanford University   In 2002, after the kidnapping of Akisato Nishimura, Japanese primatologists and Colombian biologists were forced to abandon one of Latin America’s most productive field stations for the research of rain forest ecology. Paradise Lost tells the story of how scientists and students were able for 16 years to keep a station (Centro de Investigaciones Ecológicas, Macarena) in the heart of the FARC guerrilla territory. The recent end of the FARC gives hope that the station might be reopened, but deforestation and continuing violence are ongoing challenges for doing field research in a convoluted society.

Claudia Leal holds a PhD in geography from the University of California at Berkeley and is an associate professor at the Department of History at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, where she helped create and was the first director of the Master’s program in geography. Professor Leal has conducted research on rainforest regions, focusing on the transition from slavery to freedom in one such area, the Pacific coast of Colombia. She is interested in the relationship between armed conflict and environments, and in the history of animals.  She has helped develop the field of Latin American environmental history as co-president of the Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History (SOLCHA). 

Professor Leal recently published two books:  Landscapes of Freedom, Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia (The University of Arizona Press, 2018) and A Living Past, Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America (co-editor, with John Soluri and José Augusto Pádua. Berghahn Books, 2018)

Ligth Dinner will be served