I teach on the Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature and Culture programmes in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, mainly focusing on film and the visual arts. My practice-based research focuses on visual cultures, specifically photography, and I have a particular interest in the history and culture of Cuba and its capital city, Havana.

I have published several essays on Cuba in the Western imagination and my first monograph Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City: Real and Imagined Havana was published as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies of the Americas series in 2019.

I am also a practising photographer, specialising in documentary photography and portraiture, and over the course of the past two decades I have travelled regularly to Cuba with different photographic projects. I have curated exhibitions of my own photographic work both in the UK and Cuba. My first major exhibition – Memories of a Lost Shark – was funded by Arts Council England and toured the UK and Cuba in 2013-14.

In 2018 I was awarded funding through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s flagship Open World Research Initiative for my project “¡Yo soy Fidel!”: Post-Castro Cuba and the Cult of Personality (2018-19). Following Fidel Castro’s death in 2016 and his younger brother Raúl’s retirement as president two years later, 2018 marked the end of their near six decades-long leadership of Cuba. At the beginning of the post-Castro era, therefore, this practice-based project explored the presence of iconic revolutionary images and the role of documentary photography in contemporary Cuban society, focusing on the relationship between photographic language and identity.

Drawing on fieldwork and practice-led research, the accompanying exhibition This is Cuba: Documentary photography after Fidel (2019) included images taken by renowned photographers such as Raúl Cañibano and Michael Christopher Brown. Following the success of this exhibition, I worked as Exhibition Liaison for Cañibano's first UK solo exhibition Raúl Cañibano: Chronicles of an Island at The Photographers' Gallery, London (2019). Recent projects and workshops funded by the Global Challenges Research Fund have involved collaborating with Cuban academics, curators, and photographers, and exploring innovative approaches to curatorial and photographic practice in both the UK and Cuba.

I have organised workshops and given public talks at institutions such as Tate Exchange (Tate Modern), The Photographers’ Gallery, the University of Cambridge, and the Fototeca de Cuba, Havana. I am also the Associate Director of the Humanities & Arts Research Institute, a member of the steering committee for the Centre for Visual Cultures at Royal Holloway, and an active member of several research centres and learned societies, including the Centre for Research on Cuba.

I was appointed Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2016.

More information about my research is available on PURE and on my website here.

Email: James.Kent@rhul.ac.uk