Tuesday, 8 December 2026, 6:00 PM | Gonzalo Muñoz-Vera (Virginia Tech), A View from Leicester Square: Panoramas of Mexico City (1826) and Lima (1836), and the Visual Making of Latin America

Abstract: Dr Gonzalo Muñoz-Vera examines the panorama guidebooks of Mexico City (1826) and Lima (1836), exhibited at Robert Burford’s Leicester Square Panorama in London. As companions to immersive 360-degree displays, these printed programmes functioned as early visual guides that mediated British encounters with distant urban worlds before the advent of mass tourism. Focusing on the interplay of text and image, the paper explores how these publications constructed narratives of two major Latin American capitals during a period of political transformation and imperial realignment. It argues that panorama guidebooks shaped popular understandings of urban and cultural difference while reinforcing colonial and Eurocentric ways of seeing.

About the speaker: Dr Gonzalo Muñoz-Vera is Assistant Professor of Architecture at Virginia Tech (US) and a historian of visual culture. His research investigates how images, exhibitions, and printed media have shaped understandings of cities and cultures across the Atlantic world. Focusing on nineteenth-century panoramas, architectural representation, and colonial visuality, he examines the ways urban imaginaries were constructed and circulated through popular media. Trained as an architect at the University of Chile and as an architectural historian at McGill University, he has taught in Chile, Canada, and the United States. His current work explores visual cultures of Latin America and their reception in Britain and Europe.

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