Vanesa Miseres

Assistant Professor of Spanish
Romance Languages and Literatures

Research Interests

Racial Foodscapes / Food and Race / Latin America / Latin American Women Writers / Latin American Feminism(s) / Latinx Women and Motherhood

Related Courses Taught

Women's Culture in 19th C Latin America / From Texts to Table / Food and Foodways in the Americas / Women in South America

Biography

Professor Vanesa Miseres specializes in 19th- and early 20th-century Latin America. Her research spans travel writing, war literature, women writers, gender studies, cultural studies, and food studies. Her work has been featured in Chasqui, MLN, Letras Femeninas, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, LARR, and Revista Hispánica Moderna, among others.

Her first book, Mujeres en tránsito: viaje, identidad y escritura en Sudamérica (1830–1910) , won the 2018 Alfredo Roggiano Prize for Latin American Literary Criticism (IILI) and received Honorable Mention for the Victoria Urbano Critical Monograph Prize by the Association of Gender & Sexuality Studies. Her publications also explore 19th-century journalism, visual and material culture, women in science, Modernism, food and culture, and contemporary topics such as the representation of obstetric violence in Latin American literature and visual media.

Her forthcoming book, Gender Battles: Latin American Women, War, and Feminism (University of Toronto Press, 2025), explores women's writings on war from the turn of the 20th century to World War II, highlighting their connections to feminist debates in Latin America. This project earned awards including a Mendel Fellowship (Lilly Library), a Global Gateway Faculty Research Award (Notre Dame), and a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers.

Miseres is currently writing a cultural history of gender and science in Latin America—exploring botany, domestic science, and gynecology and a cultural history of vegetarianism in Latin America since 1900. She co-edited Food Studies in Latin America: Perspectives on the Gastronarrative (University of Arkansas Press, 2021) and is collaborating with Professor Vania Smith-Oka (Anthropology) on a Humanities Without Walls-funded project using art and literature to empower Latinx women who have experienced violence during pregnancy and childbirth.

A faculty affiliated in the Gender Studies Program, Miseres is also a Fellow of the Nanovic
Institute for European Studies and the Kellogg Institute for International Studies.