Andrés M. Guiot-Isaac

I am a doctoral student in Area Studies at Brasenose College focusing in Latin America. I graduated from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia with a BA in Economics (Cum Laude) and a BA in Philosophy (Summa Cum Laude) and received an MA in Economics from the same university. Before coming to Oxford, I studied how ideas on economic development evolved to account for the political changes in Latin America during the 1960s, by exploring the works of Albert O. Hirschman, whose biography I also translated into Spanish. My research interests include the history of development economics, the relation between science and politics, and discussions about modernization and modernity.

My doctoral thesis studies the emergence and formation of an economic technocracy in Colombia during the changing national and global context of the post-World War II period. From a historical perspective, I inquire how economic expertise became embedded in the administration of the state and how economic education and analysis transformed mechanisms of public deliberation. While I focus on the Colombian case, I also engage with broader conceptual discussions in the social sciences that problematize the transfer of decision-making power to experts in modern societies and its implications for democracy, with particular emphasis in Latin America.

Brasenose College

Supervisor: Professor Eduardo Posada-Carbó