B.A., Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
B.Ed., Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Spanish Teacher, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
Ph.D, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

I am a Sessional Lecturer and Community Liaison for Spanish for Community at French, Hispanic and Italian Studies Department. Also, I work as Spanish Instructor at the Extended Learning Program at UBC since 2016. Since 2015 I have been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Columbia. As part of this work I have interviewed different Latin American studies scholars, under the supervision of the Latin American Studies program chair, Jon Beasley-Murray, as part of the Project “Latin American Studies 100: Redesigning a Core Area Studies Course”. This research project was funded through a Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF). The interviews have all been made available in video format in the LAST100 webpage (http://last100.arts.ubc.ca) under the Wikimedia Commons license.

My areas of interest are related, mostly, to the study of women’s subjectivity through private documents, such as private letters. During my Ph.D. I studied letters from 18th, 19th and 20th century Chilean women, focusing on the concept of self-representation through epistolary means. I have also compiled and edited a wide corpus of Latin American letters from the 16th to 18th century, which I have arranged as part of a critical and commented edition.

This extensive work, which corresponded to my doctoral dissertation, is currently in press and will be published by the publishing house Cuarto Propio in Chile during the second semester of 2017. Funding for this publication was awarded by the Chilean Consejo de la Cultura through the Fondo del Libro 2017 program.

During my second year as Postdoctoral Fellow, my interest has shifted towards the study of the experience of displacement by women through the analysis of literature and visual arts in Latin America, specifically in Chile. During this year, I have sought to improve the understanding of several important displacements that have affected women in Latin America, such as the experiences of migration, forced displacement and exile, among others.

In the Chilean case, I have focused my analysis on the displacement experienced by indigenous Mapuche women and its representation in Mapuche poetry. I also have analyzed private letters written by exiled Chilean intellectuals, immigrants and writers, such as, for example, Nobel laureate poet Gabriela Mistral.

During the year 2016 I also actively collaborated in a research project from Athabasca University, titled “Spanish OER”, which aimed to create a virtual platform for teaching Spanish as a second language online. This project was supervised by Michael Dabrowski, Spanish Academic Coordinator of Athabasca University. As part of the project, I worked designing, editing and filming interviews of Spanish-speaking residents in Vancouver. The platform can be accessed here: http://www.spanoer.ca/

During 2016 and 2017 I also acted as Community Liaison for the Spanish for Community program at UBC. The blog page detailing our activities can be accessed here: https://blogs.ubc.ca/spanishforcommunity/2017/01/25/news-and-events-noticias-y-eventos/. This pedagogical project aimed at improving the Conversational Spanish courses taught at UBC. I worked under the supervision of Maria Carbonetti, professor of the French, Italian and Hispanic Studies department and coordinator of the Advanced Spanish courses at UBC. My activities as part of the project include: the coordination and edition of student-made translations (from English to Spanish) of materials designed for the Latin American community in Vancouver, the elaboration of interviews that would help guide the interaction of students with the Latin American community, making contact and coordinating several visits to the classroom by key Latin American speakers, among many others.

Currently, I also work as Spanish Instructor for Extended Learning at UBC. I teach courses of Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced Spanish with the head instructor for the Spanish program, Dinorah Dugas, under the coordination of Nina Parr, Program Leader of the Languages, Cultures, and Translation Programs at UBC (https://cstudies.ubc.ca/study-topic/languages-translation).  I have also taken part of the “One Day @ UBC” initiative, teaching a course titled: “Politics, Literature and Painting through Three Women of the 20th Century: Evita Peron, Gabriela Mistral and Frida Kahlo” (https://cstudies.ubc.ca/courses/politics-literature-painting-through-three-women-20th-century-evita-peron-gabriela-mistral).

Among my recent research, I can mention the presentation “A flexible and Active Approach to Teaching Latin American Studies”, presented at the Asociación de Hispanistas panel during the Congress 2016 of the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, in Calgary, Alberta, as well as the presentation “Letters of undocumented Mexican Women in the United States: The Affective Experience of Nomadic Voices”, presented at the Canadian and Caribbean Latin American Studies Association (CALACS) panel in 2016. Finally, I should also mention the recent publication of a book review I authored, titled “William E. French, The heart in the glass jar. Love letters, bodies, and the law in Mexico” in the Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CJLACS), Vol 41, Nov. 2016, which was first presented during the launch of the title at the Liu Institute for Global Issues in March of 2016.

During 2016 I also participated in the event “Homenaje a Fernando del Paso” organized by the Mexican consulate in Vancouver, from which a paper dealing with two novels by the Mexican author Fernando del Paso (Planner de México and Noticias del Imperio) is currently in the making. Finally, there’s another essay currently in progress which deals with the experience of displacement and the notion of territoriality of Mapuche women through poetry. The first chapter of this research was presented in two events: at the biannual gathering of the Latin American Research Group, coordinated by Beatriz de Alba-Koch, at the University of Victoria, on March 11, 2017 and at the Liu Institute for Global Issues, as part of the Latin American Studies Research Seminar coordinated by Jon Beasley-Murray.

RESEARCH INTEREST

• Latin American Literature and Culture
• Chilean Literature
• Letter Writing and Epistolary Culture
• Memoir
• Women/Gender Studies, Mapuche Epistemology
• Displacement Studies
• Politics of Belonging
• Cultural Politics of Emotions
• Affect Theory