Carolina Palacios Guerra
Thesis title: Little Revolutions: Home, Identity, and Labour in Chicanx Literature
PhD in English Literature
Year of study: 5
Contact details
PhD supervisors:
Background
I hold a bachelor's degree in Literary Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia) and a MSc in Literature and Modernity from the University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on ideas of home, nation, and identity in transnational works of the 20th and 21st centuries, with an emphasis on domestic labour as a locus of contact and tension between the public and private spheres. My tutoring experience includes undergraduate courses in English (English Literature 1) and Queer Studies (Introduction to Queer Studies).
Undergraduate teaching
- English Literature 1 (2020-2021)
- Literary Studies 1A (2021-2022)
- Introduction to Queer Studies (2020-2023)
Research summary
My doctoral research draws on the fields of diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, and memory studies to read through the works of key figures in Chicana literature and scholarship, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga. On that account, this project is anchored on an exploration of 'home' as a capacious framework that pulls together understandings of domestic space, familiarity, belonging, community, reproductive labour, and national consciousness to interrogate the manner in which mestizo subjects write about dwelling and dwell in their writing. By tracing the texts' narrative and formal disobedience against hegemonic discourses on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship emerging from both México and the United States, this thesis argues that Chicana feminism and writing—allied, certainly, with Black feminist thought—inaugurate a transnational method of 'borderlands'-based resistance and cultural production that returns, in many ways, to the home as an affect.
This projects fits within my broader preoccupation with migration narratives and transcultural aesthetics, which has also led me to pursue research in Caribbean modernisms—particularly on the novels of Sam Selvon and George Lamming.
Papers delivered
- "London Is the Place for Me": Language, Community Building, and Home-Making in Sam Selvon's "Moses Trilogy." Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (virtual), 16-18 June 2022.
- "Puro Cuento": Chicana Storytelling in Sandra Cisneros’ "Caramelo." International Conference on Gender Studies: Que(e)rying Gender, London, 2-3 September 2023.
- "A Kind of Unrealness About London": Precarious Public Spaces in George Lamming and Sam Selvon’s Migrant Modernisms. Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Brooklyn, NY, 26-29 October 2023.
"London Is the Place for Me": Language, Community Building, and Home-Making in Sam Selvon’s "Moses Trilogy." Chapter in "Multidisciplinary Representations of Home and Homeland in Diaspora," edited by Jean Amato and Kyunghee Pyun, Routledge. [Accepted/In press]