Affiliated Departments and Programs

Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies
Comparative Literature Program
Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies
European Studies Program
Global Studies Program
Latin American Studies Department
Medieval Studies Program
Women’s and Gender Studies Program

Interdisciplinary Student Research Profiles

Magela Baudoin, Romance Languages PhD Candidate
Dissertation: "Writings in multitude in 20th and 21st-century Latin American Women’s literature"

Magela Baudoin has been awarded a 2023 Beall Graduate Scholarship from the Department of Romance Languages, a 2023 Graduate Writing Completion Fellowship from the Center for the Study of Women in Society, and a 2023 Dissertation and Thesis Award from the Division of Graduate Studies in support of her dissertation Escrituras en muchedumbre en la literatura latinoamericana de los siglos XX y XXI  (‘Writings in multitude in 20th and 21st-century Latin American Women’s literature’). Baudoin studies the autobiographical work of Carolina Maria de Jesus (Brazil), Matilde Casazola (Bolivia) and Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico) arguing for autobiography’s importance for discussions of aesthetics, politics, and pluralism.

Drawing on theories of affect in literature and ideas about the Global South, Baudoin demonstrates how these writings question the idea of the modern author and the very notion of originality. She argues that these autobiographies construct identities that are diverse in multiple ways, challenging stereotypes of gender, nationality, and language group affiliation.

Her project challenges a series of historical prejudices women’s writing, including the idea that women’s autobiographies are not authentically ‘intellectual,’ which has long sustained the exclusion and devaulation of women in the literary world.

Baudoin has published articles related to her dissertation in Bolivian Studies Journal, Aportes, and Cuadernos del CILHA.

Photo credit: Robert Brockmann

Sarah Agou, Romance Languages PhD Candidate
Dissertation: “Narrative Sovereignty In Contemporary Cuba, Haiti, And Indigenous Quebec: Exploring Forms Of Inhabiting Against Geographical, Political, Economical, And Identitarian Forced Enclosures”

Sarah Agou develops a comparative approach to contemporary fiction from Indigenous Quebec and Caribbean creators who construct a relationship to space, geography, community, and the environment against the coloniality of forced enclosures. Spatial enclosure takes the form of reservations and migration controls; gender violence and enforced heteronormativity create gender enclosures; debt systems, embargoes, and heavy extractivism impose an economical enclosure. The authors and film directors she puts in dialogue, such as An Antane Kapesh, Soleida Ríos, and Gessica Geneus, question this colonial heritage and explore inhabiting practices that do not rest on expropriation and extinction of other life forms.