The Great Drainage Canal of Mexico City
UNAM-United Kingdom
Speakers:
Dra. Ana Elena González Treviño (director of UNAM-United Kingdom)
Dr. Paul Garner (emeritus Professor at the Spanish and Latin American Studies Department at Leeds University)
Photograph: "Pearson, contratista de las obras de desague del Valle de México.jpg", 1900 http://200.188.19.20/islandora_74/islandora/object/fotografia%3A222142
Weetan Pearson (1856-1927), first viscount Cowdray, known as Sir Weetan Pearson and later as Lord Cowdray, was an English engineer and philanthropist who was in charge of many important civil engineering works around the world. Porfirio Díaz (1830-1916) invited him to build the Great Drainage Canal of the Valley of Mexico to solve or alleviate the serious flooding problems of Mexico City lake basin. Pearson knew how to skillfully negotiate with the Porfirian elite in order to obtain contracts such as this one. The Canal was inaugurated in 1900 in Zumpango, State of Mexico. Prof. Paul Garner, biographer of both Pearson and Díaz, explains how this and other contracts were acquired by Pearson, leaving an important legacy in Mexico City and the rest of the country.
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Dr. Paul Garner (emeritus Professor at the Spanish and Latin American Studies Department at Leeds University)
Paul Garner
Prof. Garner is a world authority on the porfiriato. He is Emeritus Professor at the Spanish and Latin American Studies Department at Leeds University, where he presided the Cowdray Chair for a decade. He initially studied at Birmingham University and got his doctorate at Liverpool University. He has worked at South Carolina University, King´s College London, University of Wales in Swansea, and Goldsmiths College University of London. He was visiting professor at the Instituto Mora and the Centre for Historic Studies, Colegio de México, for 3 years. He taught the Special Chair for the Centennaries organized by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, and the Primo Feliciano Velázquez Chair at the Colegio de San Luis Potosí.
He has been member and consultant for the Institute of Latin American Studies at London University; member of the Seminar for Advanced Studies at UNAM´s Social Research Institute; and a research member of the Leverhulme Trust. He has been member of numerous postgraduate evaluation committees in the UK and Latin America, some of them at UNAM. He has received important research grants from the British Academy, Pearson Foundation PLC, the Nuffield Foundation, the AHRC Network, among others. His most important publications are: La Revolución en la provincia: Soberanía estatal y caudillismo serrano en Oaxaca (1910-20), Regional Development in Oaxaca during the Porfiriato (1876-1911), Porfirio Díaz: A Profile in Power , Porfirio Díaz: Del héroe al dictador: una biografía política [best-seller in Mexico], British Lions and Mexican Eagles: Business, Politics, and Empire in the Career of Weetman Pearson in Mexico1889-1919 , Leones Británicos y Águilas Mexicanas: Negocios, política e imperio en la carrera de Weetman Pearson en México 1889-1919 y Porfirio Díaz: Entre el Mito y la Historia.
Ana Elena González Treviño
Ana Elena González-Treviño is full professor and researcher in English Literature (Titular "C") at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She has a B.A. in English, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from UNAM, and an PhD in English from Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. She has specialized in literary and cultural studies of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, cultural history, translation and literary criticism. She has published forty academic articles and book chapters. She has coordinated four collective books of literary and translation studies, and a book as sole author. She has directed and taken part in several research projects funded by PAPIIT-DGAPA. She directs a digital humanities
project, Imaginary Mexico based on imagology about the representation of Mexico inseventeenth and eighteenth-century print culture. She has supervised 39 BA, MA and PhD dissertations; she has and taken part in 89 BA, 25 MA and 12 PhD adjudicating committees. She is a member the Critical Theory Seminar and the Digital Humanities Seminar. She has published a book of original poetry. She is a member of the National
Research System, SNI. She was head of the Modern Languages Department and is the director of the Centre for Mexican Studies, UNAM-UK.
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Dra. Ana Elena González Treviño (director of UNAM-United Kingdom)