• Biography
• Research Interests
• Publications
• Conference and Seminar Papers

Deborah joined the Institute for the Study of the Americas as a postdoctoral research fellow in Latin American history in 2011 to work on the project ‘Liberalism in the Americas’, which will create a digital library of resources for the study of liberalism in Peru and Argentina in the long nineteenth century. She completed her PhD on alcohol and nation-building in nineteenth-century Mexico at the University of Warwick, where she also completed her MA and BA in history. Deborah has previously worked as a part-time lecturer in the history and literature of the Americas at the University of Warwick, the University of Manchester, and the University of Liverpool.

Deborah’s research interests are primarily in the history of drinking, drunkenness and alcoholism in the Americas. Her doctoral research investigated the ways in which literary, political, legal, social and medical discourses about the consumption of alcohol intersected in nineteenth century Mexico and how these discourses contributed to wider nation-building processes. Her current and future research plans centre on the role of drinking in the construction and representation of different forms of identities, particularly regarding race and nationhood, in the Americas as a whole.

• ‘Everything in its Right Place? Drinking Places and Social Spaces in Mexico City, c. 1780-1900’, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs: An Interdisciplinary Journal (forthcoming, 2011)
• ‘Drinking to Fraternity: Alcohol, Masculinity, and National Identity in the Novels of Manuel Payno and Heriberto Frías’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (forthcoming, TBC)
• ‘Xóchitl’s Bar: Pulquerías and Mexican costumbrismo’, Art and Architecture of the Americas, 8 (2010), pp. 1-16
• ‘Review: Imagining la Chica Moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917-1936, by Joanne Hershfield,’ History, 95:320 (2010), pp. 488-89.
• ‘Review: The Imagined Underworld: Sex, Crime and Vice in Porfirian Mexico City by James Alex Garza,’ History, 94:316 (2009), pp. 524-25.

• Forthcoming, September 2011: Closing time for machismo? Reassessing the gender dynamics of alcohol consumption in nineteenth-century Mexico. Food and Beverages: Retailing, Distribution and Consumption in Historical Perspective [CHORD, University of Wolverhampton]
• Forthcoming, June 2011: “The rocks become drunk”: Changing Conceptions of Drunkenness in Mexico, c. 1400-1900. Food and Drink: Their Social, Political and Cultural Histories [University of Central Lancashire, Preston]
• December 2010: Historical Concepts of Drunkenness (with Matt Jackson, University of Warwick), Postgraduate and Early Career Seminar [Institute of Historical Research, London]
• July 2010: Drinking Places and Social Spaces in Nineteenth Century Mexico, Intoxicants and Intoxication in Cultural and Historical Perspective [Christ's College, Cambridge]
• June 2010: "Faith and Fiestas: Linking Provincial Identities and pronunciamientos in Nineteenth Century Mexican Fiction". The Memory, Commemoration and Representation of the 19th-Century Mexican pronunciamiento. [University of St Andrews].
• April 2010: Lúbricas, desenfrenadas, borrachas: Femininity and Drunken Women in Nineteenth Century Mexico, Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland Annual Conference [King's College, London]
• March 2010: Everything in its Right Place? Drinking Spaces and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Mexico, Spaces of Drink: London Group of Historical Geographers Seminar [Institute of Historical Research, London]
• February 2010: Yankees, Toffs, and Miss Quixote: Drunken Bodies, Citizenship and the Hope of Moral Reform in Ninteenth Century Mexico, Cambridge Hispanic Research Seminar [Clare College, Cambridge]
• September 2009: Xóchitl’s Bar: Pulquerías and Mexican costumbrismo. Seeing the Nation: Art and Imagining in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America [University of Essex]
• April 2009: The National Disease: Alcoholism in Porfirian Mexico. Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Northern Ireland Annual Conference [Queen’s University, Belfast].
• October 2007: Patriotic Heroes or Hopeless Drunks: Alcohol, Masculinity and National Identity in Nineteenth Century Mexico. Alcohol in the Atlantic World: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives [York University, Toronto].
• July 2007: José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi and the European Enlightenment: the Search for Intellectual Justification of the Creole Identity in Late Colonial Mexico. European and New World Forms of Knowledge in Colonial Latin America [Newberry Library, Chicago].