Jessica A. Fernández de Lara Harada

Jessica A. Fernández de Lara Harada is the Postdoctoral Fellow in the Contemporary History and Public Policy of Mexico. She holds a joint appointment between the Faculty of History and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (Latin American Centre, LAC). Jessica is also an Associate Member with St Antony’s College. Her primary fields of expertise are the comparative and global histories of Mexico and Japan, Asia Latin America, and decolonial approaches in history and social thought.

Currently, Jessica is developing her first monograph, provisionally titled ‘Non-ethics of war: Racism, Dispossession and the Concentration System in the Disappearance of Mexican Japanese’. It is a social history of race, mestizaje and resistance in Mexico that centres the transpacific experiences of Mexicans of Japanese origins during the 19th and 20th centuries to map, analyse and connect ongoing global practices of displacement, dispossession, elimination and accumulation.

Jessica received her PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2022, as a Gates Scholar, and became an Associate Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy in 2021. From 2022 to 2023, Jessica was a Research Fellow and Lecturer in Japanese Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses on ‘Empire, Colonialism and Decoloniality’ and ‘Structural, Relational and Intersectional Formations of Race’ with a focus on the colonial and post-colonial relations of Asia and Latin America.

Previously, Jessica was a temporary Lecturer and Supervisor at the University of Cambridge (2018 to 2022), and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Studies at El Colegio de México (2018 to 2019). Jessica completed an MA in Latin American Studies (with Distinction) at University College London, and a BA (First Class Honours) in Law, and Economic Competition, at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is also a qualified lawyer with over five years of experience working in law firms, the private sector, and government.