I was lucky enough to work with several fantastic researchers during the funded phase of the Alcohol, Race and Ethnicity project: thanks to the AHRC for the funds to pay them!

Dr Jamie Banks was a part-time research associate on the project from 2020 to 2022, and took a leading role in convening a collaborative research programme with scholars working on aspects of the relationship between alcohol, race, and ethnicity in different parts of the world, and from a range of disciplinary backgrounds. He did a PhD on the history of opium use and Asian migration to Mauritius, British Guiana and Trinidad, and also researches the history of cannabis and mental health in Britain and the British Empire. You can read his brilliant essay on opium in the Slavery & Abolition journal and his blog post about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on our research.

Related to the theme of that blog post, Rocio Carvajal undertook vital archival research in Mexico City in mid-2022 that I had originally planned to do in mid-2020 (I wonder why that didn’t work out?) and undoubtedly did a better job than I would have done. She did forensic work in the national archive, municipal archive and photographic archives, mainly connected to the history of temperance in Mexico and has written about the experience and findings on her – highly recommended – Instagram. She is based in the beautiful city of Puebla, and is currently undertaking a PhD in anthropology, having worked as a gastronomy educator, podcaster and author for many years. You’ll find out a lot more about our previous work together on these pages, and her amazing podcast Pass the Chipotle is a must listen for anyone interested in Mexican cuisine, history and heritage.

Those are also three things you can learn lots about from Dr Natasha Bailey, who joined the project briefly as a part-time research associate in the summer of 2022. We undertook a collaborative writing project together, ending up with a book chapter on the changing relationship between alcohol, temperance and gender in the 1700s and 1800s, which appears in The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands. She did a PhD on the social history of the pulque trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the role of Indigenous Nahua communities and individuals in the trade, and she also works on gender, legal, environmental and food history. Her fabulous essay “Putting Maguey on the Map” is available via The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs journal and, if you don’t have a subscription to that, you can watch her prize-winning presentation on the same subject at the Intoxicating Spaces conference on youtube.