Julie Cupples

Cultural geography, media and cultural studies, Latin American studies, decolonial theory

BA First Class Honours, University of Bradford

MA with distinction, Newcastle University

PhD, University of Canterbury

Julie Cupples is a Professor of Human Geography and Cultural Studies. Her work spans cultural geography, media and cultural studies, and Latin American studies. It is based on in-depth research in Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Colombia and Aotearoa New Zealand and involves long-term collaborations with media companies, NGOs, civil society organizations, and Afrodescendant and Indigenous communities. She has published more than 100 books, chapters, and articles on questions of development/postdevelopment, gender and sexuality, disasters and environmental harms, elections, neoliberalism, geographical fieldwork, Indigenous and Afrodescendant media, and popular geopolitics and TV drama. As a human geographer in a School of Geosciences in a College of Science and Engineering, she also writes about "geoscientization" and the negative consequences that result from co-locating human geographers with geoscientists.

She is the author of Latin American Development (Routledge 2013) and Development and Decolonization in Latin America (Routledge 2022), the co-author of Communications/Media/Geographies, (Routledge, 2016), Shifting Nicaraguan Mediascapes: Authoritarianism and the Struggle for Social Justice (Springer 2018); Transmedia Geographies: Decoloniality, Democratization, Cultural Citizenship and Media Convergence (2025, Rutgers University Press); and the co-editor of Mediated Geographies and Geographies of Media (Springer 2015), Unsettling Eurocentrism in the Westernized University (Routledge 2018), The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development (Routledge 2019) and Producing and Contesting Urban Marginality (Rowman and Littlefield 2019). 

She is a member of Creole Connections, a collaborative AHRC-funded project that maps the cultural, geopolitical and familial connections between the San Andrés Archipelago, the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, and mainland Colombia. Between 2021 and 2025, she was the co-PI of a large GCRF grant, Ixchel, that explores how Indigenous experiences of disasters articulate with forms of coloniality and political and state-led violence. She is also an executive producer on a feature film (made as part of Ixchel) Cordillera de Fuego, directed by Jayro Bustamante. 

Her work has been funded by AHRC, ESRC, NERC, the Newton Fund and the Marsden Fund.

Julie Cupples is willing to provide expert commentary to the media on the following topics: Nicaraguan politics, including state repression, the Ortega presidency and political prisoners; the new media environment, including TV drama and Afrodescendant and Indigenous media; the cultural politics of disaster, including earthquakes and hurricanes; and the crisis facing British universities.

Development and Decolonization in Latin America

Researching with Media

http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/jcupples

http://juliecupples.wordpress.com/

http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=5A_aalIAAAAJ&hl=en

Member of the University of Edinburgh Latin America Executive

Year 4 cohort lead

Undergraduate dissertation convenor