Education

 Work Experience

Project: "Arid Futures: (Re)visions of the Desert in Contemporary Latin American Literature"

Supervisor:
Prof. Dr. Susanne Klengel, Freie Universität Berlin

The representation of the desert as a non-place – empty, timeless, inhuman, marginal – has given it a series of ambivalent connotations: uncivilized, infertile and violent, and at the same time ideal for experiencing alterity, productive solitude, and religious or intellectual revelation. In Latin America, the motif of the desert and the exploitation of the territories portrayed as such have played a crucial role in the building of identities, visions of the future and national borders, as well as in the development of subaltern movements and utopias of resistance. This project seeks to analyse representations of the desert in contemporary Latin American literature from an ecocritical and postcolonial perspective. Departing from the specificity of Latin America’s arid regions – including their geological and biological features – it aims at showing how the dialogue between the desert as literary motif and the material reality of the territories it alludes to allows these works to revisit and question old visions of the future, while at the same time evaluating and updating utopias of resistance. Moreover, this wide, interdisciplinary view of Latin American deserts aspires to contribute to a literary motif that has remained virtually unchanged in the last centuries, and that will surely become more and more important in an increasingly arid world.

Articles

Garcés, Andrea (2011): "Las fuentes del conocimiento femenino en Soledad Acosta de Samper y su articulación en el discurso fundacional", Convergencias: estudiantes de literatura en conversación 2010, Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes. 

Garcés, Andrea (2010): "Las imágenes del tiempo en Madame Bovary", Convergencias: estudiantes de literatura en conversación 2009, Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes.