Dr Denisse Lazo

• Latin American literary, cultural and audiovisual studies
• Political imaginaries, memory and cultural resistance in Latin America
• Latin American feminisms and women’s cultural activism
• Diamela Eltit and Chilean post-dictatorship fiction
• Active archives, authoritarian/neoliberal continuities and cultural circulation
• Digital humanities and mixed methods in cultural analysis
• Practice-based research, audiovisual methods and film exhibition
• Diasporic, independent and community-engaged Latin American cinema
• Transnational research partnerships across Europe and Latin America

Before entering academia, I worked for nearly a decade at the Gender Division of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). There, I contributed to research projects examining the status of women in Latin American societies. This experience continues to shape my interdisciplinary approach, which brings together literary and cultural studies, feminist theory, social science methods, digital humanities and collaborative practice-based research.

My research examines the politics of fiction, archives and audiovisual culture in Latin America, with particular attention to how women, artists and cultural practitioners have engaged with political violence, authoritarian/neoliberal continuities, memory and social transformation. I am interested in the relationship between cultural form, ideology and the social imaginary, and in how literary, visual and archival practices produce alternative ways of reading political life in the Hispanic world.

My monograph on the contemporary narrative fiction of Chilean writer Diamela Eltit offers a sociopolitical reading of the literary strategies through which her work engages with Chile’s post-dictatorship and post-transition contexts. This work has become a key foundation for my broader research agenda on active archives, political imaginaries and the circulation of cultural forms across Latin America and Europe.

My current research develops this agenda through a series of interconnected projects on women’s cultural resistance, audiovisual archives and transnational cultural circulation. The project Revolution Through Her Voice: Women’s Cultural Resistance in Latin America, the 20th Century to the Present investigates the often-overlooked roles women have played in Latin American revolutionary and transformative processes from the early twentieth century to the present. It examines women’s contributions to the workers’ press and their use of audiovisual media, particularly short films and documentaries, as alternative platforms for political expression. The project combines archival research, oral history interviews, videographic and cultural narrative analysis, and digital humanities tools to examine both textual and audiovisual materials.

I am currently developing a larger transnational research agenda around active archives, political imaginaries and cultural circulation across Europe and Latin America. This work is supported by a British Academy / Horizon Europe Pump Priming Collaboration grant, which is enabling the development of an international consortium bringing together universities, artists, filmmakers and cultural organisations. The project explores how archival, audiovisual and practice-based methods can be used to understand the circulation of political imaginaries, authoritarian/neoliberal legacies and feminist cultural memory across national and disciplinary borders.

My work increasingly incorporates practice-based and community-engaged research methods, including film exhibition, audiovisual analysis, collaborative programming, digital mapping and archival experimentation. I am particularly interested in how research can move across academic, artistic and public spaces, and in how collaborative methods can generate new forms of knowledge about memory, political imagination and cultural resistance.

I welcome enquiries regarding research supervision in any of my areas of interest, especially projects related to Latin American literary and cultural studies, feminist cultural production, audiovisual archives, political imaginaries, digital humanities, practice-based research and transnational cultural circulation