Alexandra Ortiz Wallner has a doctorate in romanistics from the University of Potsdam (Germany) and a master's degree in Latin American literature from the University of Costa Rica where she studied Spanish philology, Central American history, and philosophy. She is a researcher at the Institute of Latin American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, an institution in which she has worked as a teacher in the areas of Latin American literature and cultures and Gender Studies. She has been a visiting professor at UNAM (Mexico), the University of Nantes (France), the Catholic University, and the University of Santiago (Chile), at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University of Barcelona, and the University of Delhi, India. Her fields of specialization are Central American literature and cultures from an interdisciplinary, intersectional and historical perspective.

Publications

Books:

2012. El arte de ficcionar: la novela contemporánea en Centroamérica. Madrid/Frankfrut a.M.: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2012. 308 pp.

2016. (ed. con Susanne Klengel. Sur / South: Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America / India. Frankfurt a.M./Madrid: Vervuert/Iberoamericana.

2014 (ed. con Claudia Nickel). Zeugenschaft. Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Phänomen. Heidelberg: Winter

2012 (ed. con Beatriz Cortez y Verónica Ríos Quesada). (Per)Versiones de la modernidad. Literaturas, identidades y desplazamientos. Hacia una historia de las literaturas

centroamericanas – III. Guatemala: F&G Editores.

2011 (ed. con Ottmar Ette, Werner Mackenbach y Gesine Müller). TransitAreas. Convivencia en Centroamérica y el Caribe. Berlin: edition tranvía – Verlag Walter Frey.

Articles (selection)

2019. “Testimonio y literaturas del mundo. Notas para un debate”. En: Gesine Müller, Mariano Siskind (eds.): World Literature, Cosmopolitanism, Globality Beyond, Against, Post, Otherwise. Berlin: De Gruyter, 128-138.

2018. “Orientalismos, canon y archivo en la ciudad letrada latinoamericana”. Iberoromania 87, 96-107.

2015. “Sobre la genealogía de la violencia. Una lectura de El material humano de Rodrigo Rey Rosa”. En: Oswaldo Estrada (ed.) Senderos de violencia. Latinoamérica y sus narrativas armadas. Valencia: Albatros, 127-136.

2013. “Literaturas sin residencia fija: poéticas del movimiento en la novelística centroamericana contemporánea”. Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXXIX, 242, enero-marzo, 149-162.

Research project as a fellow of CALAS

Title: “Worlds of work. Literature and precariousness in Central America ”

Abstract: The research project proposes a re-reading of contemporary Central American literature from the configuration of the worlds of work from the decline of developmentalism to the installation of neoliberalism in the region. With this analysis, it aspires to contribute to a greater reflection on the conditions of work in the contemporary world. The analysis of a series of literary works will be the central axis of the interdisciplinary reflection that aspires to show the critical and prospective value of literary works for the understanding of one of the crises that have completely transformed the contemporary world in the global South: changes in the world of work and their effects on the configuration of today's fragile Central American societies. From the tracing of the emergence of the precarious subject in literary texts, various lines will be drawn that will show the overcoming of the figure of the poor as alterity to give rise to the precarious as a transversal device that dislodges identities (of class, race, and gender) and that announce a common and shared dimension of precariousness.