Faculty Research Fellow
Luis van Isschot (Ph.D. McGill University, 2010) is Associate Chair of Latin American Studies at the University of Toronto. His book The Social Origins of Human Rights: Protesting Political Violence in Colombia’s Oil Capital, 1919-2010 was published in 2015 by the University of Wisconsin Press (Spanish trans. Editorial Universidad de Rosario 2020). For more than two decades he has conducted research, published, and taught on social movements, human rights, extractivism, and political violence in Latin America. In addition to his academic work, he has written legal opinions on human rights cases and worked for the Colombian Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Fellowship Project: Corporate Lives and Landscapes: The Construction, Development, and Representation of Foreign-Owned Enclaves on South America’s Oil Frontier
In the early twentieth century, Standard Oil acquired vast properties across Latin America, encompassing millions of hectares of land. The company built ports, railways, roads, and towns, transforming lives and landscapes. For five decades, Standard Oil ran a private empire the likes of which had never been seen in the region. They also meticulously documented and photographed everything. This project looks at the construction and the representation of foreign-run industrial enclaves. Standard Oil’s scheme was utopian for foreign managers, engineers, geologists, and drill operators, who enjoyed great prosperity. But the advent of oil also produced a dystopian future of dispossession, conflict, contamination, and work without rights.