Vanesa Miseres

Associate Professor of Spanish
2024-2025 Internal Scholar in Residence, Gender Studies Program

Education

Ph.D., Vanderbilt University

M.A., Vanderbilt University

B.A., Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina)

Research and Teaching Interests

19th and early 20th century Latin American literature, travel literature, gender studies, women writers, food studies, war writing, women and science.

Biography

Professor Miseres specializes in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin American literature. 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, LARR, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 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, feminist food studies, women in science, and contemporary topics on women's rights such as the representation of obstetric violence in Latin American literature and visual culture.

Miseres’ second book, under contract with the University of Toronto Press, is titled Gender Battles. Latin American Women, War, and Feminism and it focuses on Latin American women’s narratives about wars and their connections with feminist debates from the late 19th century to World War II. This project was awarded a Mendel Fellowship, a Global Gateway Faculty Research Award, and a Humboldt Fellowship.

Her current book project is a cultural history of women in science in Latin America, from 1850 to 1950. The manuscript is organized into three parts focusing on botany, domestic science, and gynecology and puericulture respectively.

Miseres is also the co-editor of Food Studies in Latin America. Perspectives on the Gastronarrative (University of Arkansas Press, Food and Foodways Series 2021).

Together with professor Vania Smith-Oka (Anthropology), Miseres has won a three-year grant from Humanities Without Walls (2021-2024), a consortium that supports collaborative research and scholarship, for a project that encourages Latinx women who have suffered violence during pregnancy and childbirth to share their experiences through art and literature.

Vanesa Miseres is a research faculty in the Gender Studies Program and a Fellow of the Nanovic Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. She is an associate editor at LARR.