University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies / Staff / Tutors

Nidia Castrillón

Spanish Tutor
Room 728, Brennan MacCallum Building A18
Phone: +61 9351 6819

Nidia Castrillón was originally trained as a language-teaching specialist in the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia. Teaching methodology is incorporated into the four-year degree programme in Colombian universities. She went on to do an M.A. in literature and linguistics at the prestigious Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá, Colombia. Her dissertation was a socio-critical analysis of the short story “The Doubts of the Preacher” by the Mexican author and cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, which is included in the collection of 50 satirical fables, New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians, a parody of the treatment of Latin American indigenes by the Catholic Church during colonial times. The thesis is an attempt to show how Carlos Monsiváis subverts the religious discourse of the catechism by inverting the discursive hierarchy between native and priest, thus carrying out an aesthetic counter-conquest on the imperialising mission and cultural domination of Spanish Catholicism in the Americas.

After her arrival in Australia, she began teaching Spanish as a second language at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. She has also taught at Melbourne and Monash Universities as well as the University of the West Indies in Barbados. She also worked at RMIT University in Melbourne where she set up the Spanish programme for both Higher Education Spanish and TAFE courses and was contracted to develop the first- and second-year university courses.

She has been informally researching the portrayal of women in Colombian literature of the last twenty years. She is particularly interested in examining whether there has been a great shift from the image of women as presented in novels like One Hundred Years of Solitude (women as mothers and lovers in mainly supportive and traditional roles), and the way women are portrayed in modern Colombian literature.

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Publications

  • “La virgen de los sicarios” (film review). Published in JILAS, volume 7, number 2, December 2001.
  • 2007 (forthcoming) translation with Dr. J. Browitt of A New Catechism for Recalcitrant Indians, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica (Carlos Monsiváis, Nuevo catecismo para indos remisos).

Conference papers

  • “Carlos Monsiváis: The Preacher and His Doubts”. Institute of Latin American Studies, La Trobe University 15/03/02