Jessica Fernández de Lara Harada

Jessica A. Fernández de Lara Harada holds a three-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Faculty of History and the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (Latin American Centre). Jessica is also a member of the Oxford Japanese History Workshop and Mexico Visiting Fellow of St Antony’s College, at the University of Oxford. Her primary fields of expertise are the comparative and global histories of Mexico and Japan, race and racism, 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’. The book 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, 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, she studied a BA in Law at UNAM and an MA in Latin American Studies at UCL, and is a qualified lawyer.