Dr Liesbeth François
Degrees
- Master of Western Literature, KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium)
- PhD in Literary Studies, KU Leuven
Research Interests
Contemporary Latin American literature and visual art, especially from Mexico and Argentina, and with a focus on the following topics:
- Space in narrative fiction
- The city in literature
- Imaginaries of the underground
- Geological aesthetics
- Radical democracy
- Community and collectivity
Biography
Liesbeth François holds a PhD in Literature, awarded by KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium). She specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and culture, mainly from Mexico and Argentina. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven for seven years, she joined the University of Cambridge in 2022 as a teaching associate in Modern Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies. In 2024, she took up the position of college lecturer in Spanish and director of studies for the Modern and Medieval Languages Tripos at Â鶹ƵµÀ. She teaches and supervises on papers with a Latin American component at undergraduate level, and in the MPhil programmes in Latin American Studies and in Literature, Culture and Thought.
Broadly speaking, her research focuses on the interrelated issues of space and politics in literature. Her first book, Andares vacilantes. La caminata en la obra de Sergio Chejfec (Beatriz Viterbo, 2018) looks at the way in which the oeuvre of Argentine author Sergio Chejfec aesthetically and politically reconfigures the link between walking and writing. In a subsequent project, which led to the publication of Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature (Palgrave, 2021), she analysed the way in which subterranean imaginaries of Mexico City shed light on the tensions and concerns surrounding modernisation and urban growth in a wide-ranging corpus of literary works. Furthermore, she has published on the topics of space and mobility in the work of several Latin American authors, and co-edited three volumes on, respectively, the everyday, urban space and reimaginations of class in contemporary literature and culture. Her current project examines how several contemporary Latin American authors, filmmakers and artists re-imagine the notion of the collective by foregrounding the geological anchoring of their works as a way to investigate the distribution of agency and commonality amongst several agents, both human and non-human.