Emily Fjaellen Thompson is a PhD student in socio-cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her bachelor's degree in Latin American and Latino/a Studies from Vassar College, where she was awarded the Burnam Fellowship for work on the U.S.-Mexico border with unaccompanied minors seeking asylum and the Cornelisen Fellowship for extended fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes. She received her master's degree from the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she was granted FLAS awards to study Quechua in New York City and Cusco, and is co-author of the first tri-lingual Quechua-Spanish-English dictionary.
Thompson is the recipient of the 2021 IIS Pre-Disseration Research Grant.
My research examines state-sponsored memory spaces in Latin America as well as vernacular or “unofficial” memorials. My pre-dissertation work is focused on the afterlives of the internal armed conflict in Peru, with special attention to how Indigenous Quechua communities in the regions most impacted create and maintain spaces of memory. I explores how memory art lends itself to expressing ruptures in narrative memory, and how engagements with documentary photography in particular inform our understandings of everyday life in the aftermath of trauma.
