Barbara Castillo Büttinghausen (PhD)

Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Hispanic Studies

  • Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
  • Department of European Languages and Cultures
  • School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 4.14
40 George Square

City
Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9LH

Availability

  • My working hours are 9am to 4pm and 5pm to 7pm (Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday), Thursday from 10am to 5pm, and Friday from 9am to 1pm.
    I will only reply to emails during these hours.

Biography

Background

Dr Barbara A. Castillo Büttinghausen is a Spanish Language and Culture Assistant, based at the University of Edinburgh since 2021.  She teaches both language and content-related courses at all levels. Previously, she worked as an Associate Lecturer at St Andrews University, a Language Tutor at the University of Birmingham and as a Teaching Assistant at the University of Bristol.

Barbara was awarded her MA in Latin American Studies, Comparative Literature and Spanish Philology in 2010 (Free University of Berlin), followed by a PhD in Hispanic Studies in 2017 (University of Bristol). Her PhD thesis focused on the development of the Chilean Urban Chronicle in the Post-Dictatorship context, exploring how this non-fictional genre contests or responds to changes experienced by Chilean society from the 1990s onwards. She is currently working on publishing this thesis as a book with Liverpol University Press.

 

Qualifications

MA (Freie Universität Berlin)

PhD (Bristol University)

Responsibilities & affiliations

Currently Barbara  is on the co-ordination team for the Spanish section of the student-led magazine Babble.

Undergraduate teaching

Teaching:

  • Spanish 1B (oral, written and literature & culture)
  • Foundation 2

Course Organiser:

Spanish 1B

Research summary

My research interests lie in the spread of Contemporary Southern Cone literature and culture in Latin America, as evidenced by my work on contemporary chronicles. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, my work on Latin American literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has integrated innovative methodologies, including both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Current research interests

My next project, Feminism and Social Critique in Contemporary Latin American Travel Chronicles considers the examination of travel chronicles written by contemporary Latin American female writers, who actively engage in the search for social and gender equality by documenting and interpreting actions and ideas fostering social change in Latin America and beyond. Focusing on chronicles by Argentinian and Chilean authors, the project explores female travel writing in relation to travel writing theory. I aim to situate the chroniclers’ engagement with feminism within the wider socio-political contexts in Argentina and Chile, as well as underlining the significance of their explorations of a range of cultures and identities from the perspective of non-European female writers.

Past research interests

In my PhD thesis I explored the genre of the Chilean contemporary urban chronicle through the lens of arguably five of the most renowned exponents of the genre; Pedro Lemebel, Rafael Gumucio, Álvaro Bisama, Francisco Mouat and Roberto Merino. I demonstrate how present-day chronicles not only serve as a means for socio-political and cultural resistance, but as cultural discourses that reproduce official narratives, thus perpetuating the status quo in contemporary Chilean society. My findings in this project open up discussions regarding the contestatory socio-political spirit of this hybrid and non-fictional genre.

Organiser

“Travelling in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Latin America”, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom, October 2018. Organizer.

Participant

Selected conferences

“Oralidad y conocimiento: Las crónicas radiales de Pedro Lemebel”. Presentation of book chapter with the collaboration of Dr Fernando Blanco (Bucknell University), Dr Joanna Crow (University of Bristol) and Dr Daniel Noemi V. (Northeastern University), UK-US, 2020.

"‘Off the map’: Extending Santiago de Chile’s limits beyond urban chroniclers’ imaginaries". Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Barcelona, Spain, 2018.

“El paseo de las muñecas: Queer (In)visibility in Contemporary Santiago”. Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), Liverpool, United Kingdom, 2016.

“The Resistance of the Yegua: The Political-Cultural Work of Pedro Lemebel”. International Conference Cultural Narratives of Crisis and Renewal, University of Newcastle, Newcastle Upon Tyne, United Kingdom, 2015.

“The contemporary Chilean chronicle: a literary form of collective memories”. 50th Anniversary Conference of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), London, United Kingdom, 2014.

Castillo B., B. (14 June 2023). Why Should I Stay in the Margins and Rot? Pedro Lemebel, the Urban Chronicle and the Chilean Literary Establishment, in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Accepted/in press).

Castillo B., B. The Urban Chronicle in Post-dictatorship Chile: A Contested and Contesting Literary Genre? (Book proposal accepted by Liverpool University Press) 

Castillo B., B. (2020). “Oralidad y conocimiento en las crónicas radiales de Pedro Lemebel”, in Pedagogías de la disidencia en América Latina, ed. by Patricia Oliart, La Siniestra Ensayos, pp. 37-62. 

Castillo    B., B. (2009). El    Zócalo    encuerado: Dialogando el espacio público. This publication is part of the research project “Wem Gehört die Metropole” organized by the Free University of Berlin between 2007-2008. Paper published at http://www.lai.fu- berlin.de/forschung/lehrforschung/wem_gehoert_die_metropole/Neun_perspektiven/index.html

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