Valerie Fraser specialises in the art and architecture of Latin America and Spain with particular emphasis on the early colonial period and the 20th/21st centuries. She is Chair of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA). She has won a number of major awards from the AHRC including funding for a fully-illustrated online catalogue of ESCALA, and is currently overseeing a three-year AHRC-funded research project (2009-2012) entitled Meeting Margins: Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978 which is in collaboration with the University of the Arts London and investigates artistic relations between Europe and Latin America in the post-war period. She has worked on a number of exhibitions including Kahlo's Contemporaries held at the University Gallery in 2005, and Latin American Art: Contexts and Accomplices at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia, 2004.

• Colonial Latin American art
• Colonial Latin American architecture
• 20th century Latin American art
• 20th century Latin American architecture