Beatriz Véliz Argueta is a historian and storyteller whose work explores how landscapes, mobility, and cross-cultural encounters shape systems of knowledge and belonging. She holds a PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and an MA from the Global Studies Programme (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Jawaharlal Nehru University).

Her research combines environmental history, cartography, history of science, and art history to examine how places are constructed—visually, materially, and narratively—across colonial and postcolonial contexts. Working across multiple archives and languages, she situates Guatemalan and Caribbean histories within wider global entanglements and knowledge formations. Her work has been supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Fundación Carolina, the Max Planck Gesellschaft, and the Max Weber Stiftung.

She develops research-based storytelling projects that translate archival scholarship into immersive public formats. She is the creator of Re-mind the Nearby / Die Nähe Neu denken (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology), a digital project and podcast amplifying migrant women’s experiences of settling in Halle (Saale). She conceived and produced Transmission, Containment and Transformation, a Sawyer Seminar podcast series supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which explores colonial silence, slavery, and the resilience of women in early modern cities. Her current work continues to experiment with narrative design and sensory media as methods for rethinking how environmental and historical knowledge is constructed and shared.

Research project as a CALAS fellow (Knowledge Laboratory “A region in motion: Accelerated human mobility and multiple circulations in Latin America and the Caribbean”)

Title: Disavowed mobilities:  Exile, Carib Republics and Human-Environmental Interactions in Caribbean-Central American History

Abstract: Displacement, exile, and European–Amerindian (dis)encounters are woven into the complex tapestry of Central American and Caribbean history – threads stretching from colonial struggles into postcolonial realities. Torn amid wars among colonial powers, entire Carib communities were uprooted from their archipelagic existence and forced into exile on the Spanish mainland by the late eighteenth century. Disavowed mobilities examines the centrality of human-environmental interactions in these processes, showing how they triggered displacement, enabled resistance, and ensured survival. Moving from the Greater Antilles (Jamaica) to the Lesser Antilles (St. Vincent), and into Central America (Guatemala), the project employs digital research storytelling as a method of engaged scholarship and knowledge mobilization. In doing so, it seeks to illuminate the imagined communities forged alongside these migrations and their enduring role in building the nations we inhabit today.