Assistant Professor of Spanish
About
Isabella Vergara C, is an Assistant Professor of Spanish. Her research and teaching specializes in contemporary Latin(x) American literature, visual arts, and sound studies. She explores how gender, memory, and materiality intersect across hemispheric contexts. Her first book project, Poetic Traces: Dust, Echoes and Material Swerves, theorizes an undisciplined approach to memory and form. The book challenges dominant frameworks in memory studies by foregrounding a poetics of fragility, ephemerality, and precariousness. Drawing on experimental poetry, performance, photography, and sound, it argues that minor, unstable, and residual materials—understood as intermaterial forms—can reconfigure how we sense time and history beyond archival completeness or monumental narratives. She is also working on a second book project Sonic Weavings: Politics of Life, Care, and Intimacy in which she extends her work around sound and the everyday to focus on Latin(x) American women-identifying performance artists, poets and collective formations. It will explore how the works of diverse figures reveal the intersections between sound and performance. She will emphasize creative expressions emerging from private and public spaces such as hallways, streets, protests, and collaborative writings. Her focus is on how the shared language in textual-oral narratives in these settings serves as a pathway for forging unexpected alliances that resurfaces historical channels of solidarity and intimacy. She is the author of numerous articles published in peer-reviewed journals like Discourse, Liminalities, Photographies 2.0, Latin American Literary Review and a forthcoming article in Latin American Research Review, among others. She is currently co-editing two special issues: Silence as Expression (Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies) and Fracturar la forma: Collage y la imaginación de lo político (Latin American Research Review). Additionally, she has taught courses on a range of topics, including gender, memory, visual and sonic cultures, and the relationship between art and social change in contemporary Latin(x) America. These courses include On Women and Witches, The Poetics of Memory, Sonic Cultures in Latin(x) America, and Artivism.
