Dr Fernanda Peñaloza

DPhil (Exeter, UK); MA (Exeter, UK); Licenciada (UBA, Argentina)
Lecturer in Latin American Studies
Room 722, Brennan MacCallum Building A18

phone: +61 2 9351 6893

I joined the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies after eight years living in the UK, where I completed my postgraduate studies at the University of Exeter and then lectured in Latin American Studies at the University of Manchester for four years.

Currently I am coordinating SURCLA (Sydney University Research Community for Latin America), an academic research network that was originally conceived by the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies (School of Languages and Cultures), but which rapidly gained the support of members of different departments and schools across the Faculty of Arts.

Together with fellow members of SURCLA Dr Vek Lewis and Dr Verónica Quinteros I am working on a FARSS (Faculty of Arts Research Support Scheme) funded research project entitled Latin American Migration in Sydney: The Chilean Case. By combining ethnographic interviewing, document collection, and discourse analysis, this project seeks to uncover the wide range of meanings and uses that processes of identity formation, differentiation, recognition and negotiation play among members of Sydney’s Chilean community.

Additionally, in the last few years I’ve been working on a study of cultural production of Patagonia in the context of Argentine-Chilean relations. I am exploring the interrelation between discursive operations and cultural production during the period that signals a major shift in the whole history of Chilean and Argentine interstate relations: the 1978 mobilization for war to political rapprochement.

A third strand of my research is ‘Constructions of Blackness in Argentina’. I am analysing cultural practices and discursive operations of cultural appropriation and processes of identity formation, particularly in relation to the historiography of tango.

Research Areas

• Migration and Latin American identities.
• 19th to 20th Century Latin American processes of cultural production, circulation and consumption;
• Narrative constructions of models of modernity and identity;
• Interrelations between fiction, colonial discourse, travel writing, aesthetics and anthropology.

Current Projects

• Latin American Migration in Sydney: The Chilean Case
• Argentine and Chilean cultural relations: Imagining “la frontera sur”
• Constructions of Blackness: The "Afro-Argentines"

Selected Publications

Books

• Patagonia: Myths and Realities. Ed. Claudio Canaparo, Fernanda Peñaloza and Jason Wilson. Oxford: Peter Lang (In Press)

Articles

• “On Skulls, Orgies, Virgins and the Making of Patagonia as a National Territory: Francisco Pascasio Moreno’s Representations of Indigenous Tribes”. Forthcoming in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2009.
• ‘Appropriating the 'Unattainable': The British Travel Experience in Patagonia’ in Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture, Commerce and Capital, Mathew Brown, ed. Bulletin of Latin American Research. 27.1: 149-172.
• “Mapping Constructions of Blackness in Argentina”. Indiana (Ibero-Americanisches Institute, Berlin) 24: 2007, 211-234.
• “A Sublime Journey to the Barren Plains: Lady Florence Dixie's Across Patagonia (1880)", Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, (University of Western Australia), 10: 2004, 81-97. (http://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/).
• "The Ethnographic Imagination and the Tehuelches", Across the Great Divide Conference: Selected Papers from the IV Symbiosis Conference, Scotland's Transatlantic Relations Project (STAR), University of Edinburgh, April 2004. (www.star.ac.uk/Archive/Publications.htm)

Conference Activity

• July 2008
  ‘Historiograf'a de la cultura popular: demonización y romanticización de los Afrodescendientes en la reconstrucción de los “or'genes del tango”’
  2008 Conference of the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies in Australasia, Melbourne.
• May 2008
  ‘Discursos e imaginarios: el análisis de los espacios geográficos a través de los estudios culturales
  Invited speaker for graduate workshop series, Ciencias de la Comunicación, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
• September 2007
  ‘Narrating Patagonia from within: Asencio Abeijón's Travel Stories.’
  XXVII International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association
  LASA, Montreal.
• March 2007
  ‘Mapping otherness and selfhood in the Welsh colony of the Chubut Valley’ (invited speaker)
  AHRC research network meeting: Languages, literatures and identities in South America organised by Welsh Institute for Social and Cultural Affairs (WISCA).
• February 2007
  ‘The Poetics of Blackness in Argentina: Casildo Thompson’s “Canto al Africa”’
  Parallel Lines, Parallel Lives?
  Comparative Approaches and Dialogues in Postcolonial Studies, with a Specific Focus on Relations between Africa and the Americas, Institute of Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, University of Leeds.
• January 2007
  ‘Appropriating the ‘Unattainable’: the British Travel Experience in Patagonia’ (Invited speaker)
  Informal Empire? Commerce and culture outside Britain's formal empire in the long nineteenth-century, Bristol Institute for the Research in the Humanities and Arts, University of Bristol.
• January 2007
  ‘Explorando los confines del Imperio: viajeros británicos en la Argentina decimonónica’
  Seminar Series, Centro de Estudios Literarios, Instituto de investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM, Mexico.
• June 2006
  ‘Doomed to disappear: The ‘Vanishing Indian’ trope in Ramón Lista’s account on the Tehuelches’
  Mediations and Meditations: Iberia and Latin America in Travel Writing, Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London.
• November 2005
  ‘On Skulls, Orgies, Virgins and the Making of Patagonia as a National Territory: Francisco Pascacio Moreno’s Representations of Indigenous Tribes’
  Visiting speaker, Research Seminar Series, University of Sheffield, Department of Hispanic Studies.
• July 2005
  ‘Sublime Itineraries in Nineteenth-Century Travel Narratives on Patagonia’
  Mobilis in Mobile, International Conference on Studies in Travel Writing, The University of Hong Kong.
• April 2004
  ‘Darwin’s Patagonia: living the unimagined and narrating the unimaginable’.
  Connecting Cultures: International, interdisciplinary conference, Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH) at the University of Kent.

Other Professional Contributions

• November 2007
  Transcultural exchanges in Tango
  Invited speaker for the opening concert of the “Transtango Project”, Alexander Balanescu with Pablo Mainetti. The Bloomsbury Theatre, London
• March 2007
  Co-organiser with Dr Claire Lindsay (UCL) and Dr Joanna Page (University of Cambridge) of cultural event ‘Remembering the Malvinas in Argentine Literature and Film’
• March 2007
  Organiser of ‘Reading aloud: in conversation with Argentine writer Carlos Gamerro (b.1962)’
  Supported by CLACS (Centre for Latin American Cultural Studies) and Instituto Cervantes
• September 2005
  Organiser of ‘Patagonia: Myths and Realities International Conference’
  Supported by SLAS, CLACS (Centre for Latin American Cultural Studies, University of Manchester), Instituto Cervantes, University of Exeter..
• February 2005 –Present
  Member of Steering Committee, CLACS (Centre for Latin American Cultural Studies, University of Manchester).