My name is Elisabeth and I am a Belgian third-year PhD student in Hispanic Studies (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures) at the University of Edinburgh. From March until July this year, I am a visiting scholar at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata. During this time, I will be living in Buenos Aires, studying at the UNLP. I also have some travel plans!
This blog is meant to record and reflect on my time here, as I try to articulate how living in Argentina impacts my PhD project. While I cannot predict the exact content of the fortnightly blog entries, I anticipate that I will be continuously confronted with my Eurocentric outlook on research (and life) as well as the limits of my knowledge of Argentina’s cultural field.
My PhD project centres around contemporary Argentinian women’s writing and their Anglophone translations. Latin American, and especially Argentinian, women’s writing has gained popularity and recognition in the past few years, not only within Argentina and Latin America but also in the Anglophone market and in Europe. Many of these authors use prose (novels and short stories) or other genres to thematise social injustices, sexism, poverty, economic precariousness, and so on.
In my PhD project, I study narratives about gender-based violence by Selva Almada, Dolores Reyes and Mariana Enríquez. I look at discourse used by authors and translators within the books to talk about gender-based violence. Furthermore, I also look at how authors, translators, publishers, critics, and readers talk about the books both in Argentina and in the Anglophone book market.
I am interested in why and how these narratives resonate with their Argentinian and Anglophone readerships, and how their popularity influences the Anglophone perception of Argentina, Latin American literature, gender-based violence, and feminism.
For a more elaborate explanation of how I decided on this PhD topic, have a look at my first blog post.
You can also follow me on X and contact me on elisagoemans@hotmail.com
Photo credits: Tamsin Pritchard
