Guilherme Fians

Guilherme Fians is Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems. Having joined the project in March 2022, Guilherme’s current research looks at how the use of certain media and languages help shape the ways in which political and scientific knowledge are produced during two critical moments in globalisation’s history: the early twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. Through archival research and digital ethnography, this comparative study takes cross-border communication in Esperanto as its entry point to ask: what role have hegemonic languages, constructed languages such as Esperanto and particular media played in these scenarios of international knowledge production and circulation? From analysing letters about postcolonialism exchanged in Esperanto between Indian and British scholars in the 1960s to online messages exchanged in English between antivax activists in Brazil and France in the 2020s, this project examines how languages and media are historically mobilised for the (re)production of certain viewpoints about political and scientific issues.