
Dr Barbara Castillo Büttinghausen is an Early Career Teaching and Research Fellow in Hispanic Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, she held posts as Assistant Language Tutor at the University of Birmingham, Associate Teacher at the University of Bristol, and Associate Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of St Andrews. She studied Latin American Studies, Spanish Literature and Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin. In 2017, Barbara received her PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of Bristol. Her thesis focused on the development of the Chilean Urban Chronicle in the Post-Dictatorship context, exploring how this non-fictional genre contests or responds to changes experienced by Chilean society from the 1990s onwards. She is currently working on publishing this thesis as a book with Liverpool University Press. Her most recent publication—in press for Bulletin of Hispanic Studies—‘Why Should I Stay in the Margins and Rot? Pedro Lemebel, the Urban Chronicle and the Chilean Literary Establishment’, discusses the role Chilean chronicler Pedro Lemebel has played in terms of reshaping the literary canon in Chile.
My research interests lie in the spread of Contemporary Southern Cone literature and culture in Latin America, as evidenced by my work on contemporary chronicles. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, my work on Latin American literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has integrated innovative methodologies, including both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Currently, I am working in the publication of my first monograph, in which I explore the genre of the Chilean contemporary urban chronicle through the lens of arguably five of the most renowned exponents of the genre. I demonstrate how present-day chronicles not only serve as a means for socio-political and cultural resistance, but as cultural discourses that reproduce official narratives, thus perpetuating the status quo in contemporary Chilean society. My findings in this project open up discussions regarding the contestatory socio-political spirit of this hybrid and non-fictional genre. My next project will engage in the search for social and gender equality by documenting and interpreting actions and ideas fostering social change in Latin America and beyond. Focusing on chronicles by Argentinian and Chilean authors, the project explores female travel writing in relation to travel writing theory. I aim to situate the chroniclers’ engagement with feminism within the wider socio-political contexts in Argentina and Chile, as well as underlining the significance of their explorations of a range of cultures and identities from the perspective of non-European female writers.