Alan Angell

It is with great sadness that the Latin American Centre shares the news of the death, on Saturday 1 August, of our dear colleague and friend Alan Angell.

Alan was one of the first members of the Latin American Centre, which he joined in 1966, almost at the time of its foundation.  He was appointed Oxford University Lecturer and Fellow of St Antony’s in 1970, where he remained during the rest of his academic career until his retirement in 2006.

While his early publications had been mostly on Colombia, he became a leading expert on Chile, writing extensively on its politics and society; he also published on Peru and on the Latin American left.

Thanks to Professor Leigh Payne’s initiative, on 21 January last year, the LAC hosted the launch of the book Fifty Years of Human Rights on Chile: Essays in Honour of Alan Angell, co-edited by Valentina Infante-Batiste and Richard D. Wilkinson, a very special and memorable occasion.  An exhibition of his publications on a wide range of Latin American topics was organised by the LAC Library also last year.

Highly esteemed by his colleagues and students (he supervised some 30 DPhil students and a much larger number on our masters’ programmes), his contribution to the LAC, to the development of Latin American Studies, and in particular to our understanding of Chile, was enormous.  In recognition for his work on Chile, the Chilean state awarded him the Orden de Bernardo O’Higgins.

Our thoughts are with his wife, Susan McRae, his sons, Martin and Stephen and their families.