Documenting Women’s Literary Networks under the Chilean Dictatorship (1973–1990)

Paula Cucurella
Hispanic Studies
UC Riverside

This project supports a research trip to Chile that is essential for completing the archival and analytical components of my doctoral dissertation on poetry written by women during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). The dissertation reconstructs this corpus as an affective archive of violence, demonstrating how women’s poetry registers and transforms the overlapping effects of political repression and gendered violence under conditions of censorship. A significant portion of the materials required to complete this research—poetry books, magazines, workshop publications, and editorial documents—are held only in Chilean national and regional archives, are not digitized, and cannot be accessed through U.S. research libraries or interlibrary loans. The project documents women’s literary networks, including workshops, magazines, and small publication circuits that sustained poetic production during the dictatorship and remain marginalized in canonical literary histories. A central research tool is an interactive digital map that consolidates and cross-checks archival findings, making visible both collaborative networks and archival absences.