WISPS Exec :
President - Niamh Thornton
Vice President - Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
Secretary - Lesley Wylie
Treasurer - Jennifer Fraser
Postgraduate Rep - Ellie Woodacre
Web Administrator - Sarah Bowskill
Member without portfolio - Helena Buffery
2010 Conference organisers - tbc
President - Niamh Thornton
Niamh Thornton received her DPhil from the University of Dublin, Trinity College in 2003. Her thesis, “Women Writers and the Mexican Revolution” has been converted into a book published in 2006 by Edwin Mellen Press. She has also co-edited a book with Par Kumaraswami entitled Revolucionarias: Conflict and Gender in Latin American Narratives by Women (Peter Lang, 2006).
She currently lectures in Spanish Language, and Latin American Culture and Film at the University of Ulster. She has published several articles on women’s writing and Latin American and Spanish film. Identity, war and conflict have been at the heart of much of her research, in particular, representations of the Revolution and post-Revolutionary conflict in Mexico. Her first book dealt with the Mexican novelas de la Revolución, the theme of Gender and conflict, queer theory, subaltern and marginalized voices and discourses of nation and nationhood. She has continued to examine these themes and areas as they apply to other texts and has expanded on this, also looking at new areas such as film and digital media. In preparation: project on the representations of the war story in Mexican literature and film.
Vice President - Helena Miguélez-Carballeira
Helena Miguélez-Carballeira received her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in March 2005. Her thesis studied the Anglo-American reception of the so-called boom of Spanish feminist writers in the early eighties with particular focus on the English translations of the works of Mercè Rodoreda, Esther Tusquets and Rosa Montero.
She was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Aberdeen and has been a Lecturer in Spanish in Bangor University since January 2005.
Her research so far has addressed themes such as gender in translation, metacritical approaches to Hispanism and Galician Studies.
She has co-edited with Kirsty Hooper a Special Issue for the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies on contemporary Galician Studies (2009) and is the founding co-editor of Galicia 21: Journal of Contemporary Galician Studies (www.galicia21journal.org).
Her current research looks at gender and Galician literary historiography as well as gender and nationalism.
Secretary - Lesley Wylie
Lesley Wylie's PhD on the novela de la selva was completed at the University of Cambridge in 2006 and published by Liverpool University Press in 2009 as Colonial Tropes and Postcolonial Tricks: Rewriting the Tropics in the novela de la selva.
Between 2006 and 2009 she was Senior Research Officer of the AHRC-funded project ‘American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography’ in the Department of Literature, Film, and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex.
In 2009 she joined the School of Modern Languages at the University of Leicester as Lecturer in Latin American Studies.
Her research focuses on Latin American literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, particularly writing from the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon.
Her current research on the literary geography of the Putumayo River on the Colombian-Peruvian border is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press as part of the series ‘American Tropics: Towards a Literary Geography’, which she is co-editing with Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Peter Hulme, and Owen Robinson.
Postgraduate Rep - Ellie Woodacre
Web Administrator - Sarah Bowskill
Sarah was appointed as a Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at Swansea University in 2007. She has published in the areas of Mexican literature and Mexico-U.S. border literature. She is currently preparing a monograph on the formation of the Mexican canon and starting a new project on the role of literary prizes in Mexican culture.