Vanesa Miseres

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Romance Languages and Literatures

Research Interests

19th Century Latin American Literature/Cultural Studies/ Gender and Food Studies

Related Courses Taught

From Texts to Table, Women in South America: Between Medicine and Feminism

Biography

Professor Miseres specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American literature, with an emphasis on South America. Her areas of research are travel writing, war literature, women writers, gender, cultural, and food studies. Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Chasqui, MLN, Letras Femeninas, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, among others.

Her first book, Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830-1910) won the 2018 Alfredo Roggiano Prize for Latin American Literary Criticism (IILI) and also received Honorable Mention for the Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Prize by the Association of Gender & Sexuality Studies (formerly AILCFH). Miseres' other publications engage with a wide range of topics, including 19th century visual culture, women in 19th century journalism, Modernism, the connections between food and literature, and contemporary topics on women's rights such us the representation of obstetric violence in Latin American literature and visual culture.

Professor Miseres is working on two new books. The first is Gender Battles, which focuses on Latin American women writing on war, from the Latin American independence period to World War II. This project was awarded with a Mendel Fellowship (Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington) and a Global Gateway Faculty Research Award (University of Notre Dame) for the academic year 2017-2018. Her second book project in progress combines literary studies with approaches to visual and material culture to analyze 19th and 20th century Latin American women's friendship albums, scrapbooks, and cookbooks.

Miseres is also the co-editor of Gastronarratives. Food, Literature, and Culture in Latin America (forthcoming, University of Arkansas Press, Food and Foodways Series).

Vanesa Miseres is a research faculty of the Gender Studies Program and a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.