Vanesa Miseres

Director of Graduate Studies of Spanish
Associate Professor of Spanish

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

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, 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, the connections between food and literature, and contemporary topics on women's rights such as 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. Latin American Women, War, and Feminism, 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), a Global Gateway Faculty Research Award (University of Notre Dame) for the academic year 2017-2018, and a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers for the calendar year of 2022. Her second book project in progress is a cultural history of gender and science in Latin America, covering the time period of 1850 to 1950. The manuscript is designed in 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, a consortium that supports collaborative research and scholarship, for a project that will encourage Latinx women who have suffered violence during pregnancy and childbirth to share their experiences through art and literature.
 
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.