Bieke Willem is professor of Romance literature at the University of Cologne, Germany, and senior researcher at the Global South Studies Center (GSSC). She holds a PhD in literature from the University of Ghent, Belgium (2014). She has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and then as a lecturer at Stockholm University, Sweden, specializing in contemporary Latin American literature. She has contributed to books and academic journals with articles on memories of the Chilean (post)dictatorship, on the literary representation of space, and on its effect in literature and film. Her main line of work currently aims to analyze the role of landscape in fantasy literature. In 2022, she participated in the CALAS knowledge laboratory, "The Anthropocene as a multiple crisis: Latin American perspectives" at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico.

 

Publications (selection):

Books

2016. El espacio narrativo en la novela chilena postdictatorial. Casas habitadas. Leiden/Boston: BRILL.

 

Journal articles and book chapters

2021. "Miradas aéreas en la literatura de Santiago de Chile. Desde Le Corbusier al frequent flyer contemporáneo." Iberoromania Vol. 94 (Nov.), p. 235-251. Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/iber-2021-0022

2020. “A ‘New Continent of Data’: Pola Oloixarac’s Dark Constellations and the Latin American Jungle Novel.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory Vol. 31 no 2, p. 129-145. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2020.1747181

2020. “Tiempo y paisaje en la narrativa chilena provincial actual. El caso de Jeidi de Isabel M. Bustos.” 2020. Mapocho, Vol. 88, p. 316-328.

2018 (with S. Musch). “Clarice Lispector on Jewishness after the Shoah: a Reading of ‘Perdoando Deus’.” Partial Answers. Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 16.2, p. 225-238.

2016 (with S. Dufays). Intimidad y política. Special Issue of Letras Hispanas 12.

 

Research project as a CALAS fellow

Title: Paisajes siniestros. Narrating the Anthropocene in Latin America

Abstract: The project argues that the long tradition of Latin American fantasy literature offers unique strategies for capturing the scale of the Anthropocene, for understanding its historical, political, and cultural roots, and for imagining alternative relationships between the human and the non-human. A selection of novels set in "extractive zones" (Gómez-Barris 2017) shall be analyzed to detect narrative strategies particular to the fantasy that allow us to narrate the multiple crises of the Anthropocene