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 living in the UK for eight years. 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. I am expanding my field of expertise by integrating multiple discursive positionings—political, historical, social and gendered—with the trajectory of different cultural productions from Argentina and Chile. In my main current project, I am investigating crucial intersections between textual representation and cultural market structures in relation to the configuration of a “southern border”. A second 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. .

• 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.

• Argentine and Chilean cultural relations: Imagining “la frontera sur”
• Constructions of Blackness: The "Afro-Argentines"

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. (www.arts.uwa.edu.au/limina).
• "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)

• 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 & 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.

• 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).