Bárbara Fernández Melleda

Bárbara arrives in Hong Kong in 2019 after working as a Teaching Fellow in Spanish at The University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on a variety of topics that analyse Chilean literature, such as intersections between articulations of the female psyche, the criticism of neoliberal principles within a post-dictatorship context, biblical references in poetry and narrative, and memory/post-memory constructions in Chilean writing, among others. Her current research project examines how the future is portrayed and imagined in the narratives of two contemporary Chilean novelists.

Lately, Bárbara has been exploring the cultural relationship between China and Latin America, more specifically with Chile through poets Pablo Neruda and Pablo de Rokha. She has received a grant to conduct research in Beijing in order to find out details concerning the great friendship between Pablo Neruda and Ai Qing, and how this permeates poetic work.

As a Latinamericanist, Bárbara’s teaching portfolio is broad. She has lectured on Chilean culture, canonical authors from the Latin American Boom and Nobel Prize winners, XIX century foundational and abolitionist novels from Cuba, Perú and Argentina, Latin American visual culture and fine arts, and Latin American cultural theory.

Dr. Fernández Melleda works as a member of La Joyita Cartonera publisher based in Chile and seeks to explore issues of representation, creation, and resistance in cartonera publishers in Latin America. She is a peer reviewer for a variety prestigious journals and reviews books on Latin American literary criticism for a large UK University Press. Bárbara also contributes to the dissemination of Chilean current affairs for an international audience in Alborada, an independent voice on Latin American politics and culture based in London.