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Our teaching and research team
GANDOLFI, Laura
Professor
Col·laboradora
Faculty of Humanities
Department of
Department of Humanities
Contact
Ext.
4343
Academic training
- Princeton University
- Princeton University
- University of Trieste
ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS
2013 Princeton University
PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures
2010 Princeton University
MA in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures
2007 Università degli Studi di Trieste
MA in Modern Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, Summa cum laude
2005 Università degli Studi di Trieste
BA in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, Summa cum laude
Acknowledgements
-
Programa para Actividades Especiales de Cooperación Interintitucional PAECI
2024 -
Franke Fellowship, Franke Institute for the Humanities
2015 -
Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) Summer Travel Grant
2013 -
Porter Ogden Jacobus Honorific Fellowship, highest honor of the Graduate School of Princeton University
2012 -
Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) Research Grant
2012 -
Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) Summer Travel Grant
2012 -
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Travel Grant
2012 -
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Travel Award
2011 -
The Eleanor Green Fellowship in American Literature
2009 -
Perkins Prize
2008
Research lines
<p class="PDq2pG_selectionAnchorContainer">My research focuses on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Hispanic American literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on Mexico and from a comparative, transatlantic, and interdisciplinary perspective. I approach literature not as an autonomous system of forms, but as a privileged site of mediation between language and experience: a practice capable of interrogating our relationship with matter, images, bodies, archives, the nonhuman, the sacred, and transcendence.</p> <p>One of the central strands of my work examines the relationship between literature and material culture. Through the study of objects, collections, museums, exhibitions, commodities, and images, I have explored how Latin American modernity is articulated through material forms of circulation, desire, accumulation, memory, and representation. This line of inquiry, developed most fully in my monograph <em>Objetos itinerantes. Ficción y cultura material en el México decimonónico</em>, understands objects not as mere accessories to the literary text, but as critical agents through which categories such as modernity, nation, consumption, authenticity, and experience can be reconsidered.</p> <p>Building on this investigation of materiality, my work has increasingly turned toward relations between the human and the nonhuman. My current project on animals in Mexican literature and culture from the Porfiriato to the post-revolutionary period explores nonhuman agency, interspecies hierarchies, and the ways in which modernity produces, classifies, and administers the distinction between the human and that which lies beyond its boundaries. The project engages with animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanist approaches while remaining firmly grounded in the historical and aesthetic specificity of Latin American archives.</p> <p>A second major strand of my research investigates the relationships between literature, religion, mysticism, and transcendence. I am particularly interested in what happens to literary language when it attempts to give form to experiences that exceed ordinary regimes of representation: how the sacred can be written, how an experience of transcendence can be represented, and what formal resources literature develops when confronted with the ineffable. My project on twentieth-century Mexican mystical poetry addresses these questions in dialogue with literary theory, the cultural history of religion, theology, and Hispanic mystical traditions.</p> <p>Materiality and transcendence are thus not opposing poles of my research, but complementary ways of interrogating the limits of representation. Objects, bodies, animals, and mystical experiences pose, from radically different positions, a common question: what can literature do when confronted with that which exceeds or resists conceptual capture? I am particularly interested in these thresholds, where language encounters a form of alterity that cannot be fully reduced to meaning, and where such resistance requires us to reconsider fundamental categories such as subjectivity, agency, presence, knowledge, and representation.</p> <p>A further dimension of my work focuses on print culture, archives, and the recovery of materials neglected by canonical literary histories. I have worked extensively with periodicals, newspapers, visual materials, and texts with limited or ephemeral circulation, and I am currently developing projects in critical editing and archival recovery. In this area, I am particularly interested in the intersection of philology, literary history, and the digital humanities, as well as in the potential of digital tools to reconstruct fragmented, dispersed, or historically overlooked corpora.</p> <p>My most recent research extends these concerns into contemporary literature and the study of embodiment, motherhood, care, and attention, asking how literary forms render visible vulnerability, dependency, and the limits of knowledge. Taken together, my work develops a sustained inquiry into the boundaries of literary representation and into literature’s capacity to produce knowledge precisely where language and experience come into tension: between matter and transcendence, human and nonhuman, body and spirit, presence and absence, archive and silence.</p>Publications
-
Nueva revista de filología hispánica, Liturgia y modernidad poética: los haikais de Alfonso Castro Pallares en Ábside
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2027ISSN or title: 0185-0121 -
Mitologías Hoy, Un museo portátil
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2026Start page: 24 End page: 42 Vol.: 34DOI: 10.5565/rev/mitologias.1239 ISSN or title: 2014-1130 -
Literatura mexicana, Palabras, objetos y Nación: las Exposiciones Universales y la ‘novela-museo’ de Manuel Payno. Una relectura de Los bandidos de Río Frío
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 71 End page: 100 Vol.: 35 No.: 2ISSN or title: 0188-2546 -
Hispania Sacra, Apuntes para una historia de la prensa católica mexicana en la primera mitad del siglo XX
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 1 End page: 9 Vol.: 76 No.: 153ISSN or title: 0018-215X -
La Colmena, Consumo delirante: los objetos degenerados del modernismo mexicano. Una lectura de Por donde se sube al cielo (1882) de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 17 End page: 32 No.: 122 -
Bibliographica, Contribuciones de la revista Ábside a los estudios de bibliografía mexicana
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2023Start page: 291 End page: 312 Vol.: 6 No.: 1 -
(an)ecdótica, Apuntes acerca de la genealogía de Tardes nubladas. Colección de novelas (1871) de Manuel Payno
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2020Start page: 9 End page: 29 Vol.: 4 No.: 2 -
Revista Landa, Notas acerca de Las Hortensias: la vidriera de la memoria
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2015Start page: 190 End page: 210 Vol.: 3 No.: 2 -
Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, La Ocasión de Juan José Saer: hacia una tensión entre espíritu y materia
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2010Start page: 287 End page: 298 Vol.: 8 -
The Journal of Lusophone Studies, Princesa: The Textual Space between Translation and Divergence
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2010Start page: 75 End page: 90 Vol.: 8 -
Psychoanalysis and history, Freud in Trieste: Journey to an Ambiguous City
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2010Start page: 129 End page: 151 Vol.: 12 No.: 2DOI: 10.3366/pah.2010.000 ISSN or title: 1460-8235
Publications
-
Objetos itinerantes. Ficción y cultura material en el México decimonónico
Publishing date: 2024 Isbn: 978-607-30-8883-1
Publications
-
La disciplina de escuchar: Merton traducido por Cardenal. Poesía y traducción. La pasión inalcanzable
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2026 -
Ritmos de modernidad. Tecnología, medios y crítica cultural en la obra de Amado Nervo. Más allá de los géneros literarios Cruces, textos híbridos, écfrasis
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2026 -
Manuel Payno y Le Nouveau Monde. Manuel Payno. Letras, viajes, política y placeres
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 41 End page: 50ISBN: 978-607-30-8827-5 -
Prólogo. Manuel pain. Letras, viajes, política y placeres
Name: Gandolfi, Laura; Castro, M. Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 15 End page: 20 -
Recorrido por los caminos de Payno. Manuel Payno. Letras, viajes, política y placeres
Name: Gandolfi, Laura; Arenas, J. Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 257 End page: 301ISBN: 978-607-30-8827-5 -
El túnel e lo scandalo del matricidio: convergenza/divergenza di due miti.. Scandalo: Quaderni di Synapsis VIII
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2009Start page: 246 End page: 255
Subjects taught
Course 2026-2027 - Period: 01/09/2026 - 31/08/2027
-
Bachelor's Degree
Bachelor's Degree in Humanities and Cultural Studies- - Studies of Area I: Literature
- Princeton University
- Princeton University
- University of Trieste
ACADEMIC QUALIFICATIONS
2013 Princeton University
PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures
2010 Princeton University
MA in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures
2007 Università degli Studi di Trieste
MA in Modern Foreign Languages, Cultures, and Literatures, Summa cum laude
2005 Università degli Studi di Trieste
BA in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures, Summa cum laude
-
Programa para Actividades Especiales de Cooperación Interintitucional PAECI
2024 -
Franke Fellowship, Franke Institute for the Humanities
2015 -
Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) Summer Travel Grant
2013 -
Porter Ogden Jacobus Honorific Fellowship, highest honor of the Graduate School of Princeton University
2012 -
Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS) Research Grant
2012 -
Program in Latin American Studies (PLAS) Summer Travel Grant
2012 -
Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Travel Grant
2012 -
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) Travel Award
2011 -
The Eleanor Green Fellowship in American Literature
2009 -
Perkins Prize
2008
<p class="PDq2pG_selectionAnchorContainer">My research focuses on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Hispanic American literature and culture, with a particular emphasis on Mexico and from a comparative, transatlantic, and interdisciplinary perspective. I approach literature not as an autonomous system of forms, but as a privileged site of mediation between language and experience: a practice capable of interrogating our relationship with matter, images, bodies, archives, the nonhuman, the sacred, and transcendence.</p>
<p>One of the central strands of my work examines the relationship between literature and material culture. Through the study of objects, collections, museums, exhibitions, commodities, and images, I have explored how Latin American modernity is articulated through material forms of circulation, desire, accumulation, memory, and representation. This line of inquiry, developed most fully in my monograph <em>Objetos itinerantes. Ficción y cultura material en el México decimonónico</em>, understands objects not as mere accessories to the literary text, but as critical agents through which categories such as modernity, nation, consumption, authenticity, and experience can be reconsidered.</p>
<p>Building on this investigation of materiality, my work has increasingly turned toward relations between the human and the nonhuman. My current project on animals in Mexican literature and culture from the Porfiriato to the post-revolutionary period explores nonhuman agency, interspecies hierarchies, and the ways in which modernity produces, classifies, and administers the distinction between the human and that which lies beyond its boundaries. The project engages with animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanist approaches while remaining firmly grounded in the historical and aesthetic specificity of Latin American archives.</p>
<p>A second major strand of my research investigates the relationships between literature, religion, mysticism, and transcendence. I am particularly interested in what happens to literary language when it attempts to give form to experiences that exceed ordinary regimes of representation: how the sacred can be written, how an experience of transcendence can be represented, and what formal resources literature develops when confronted with the ineffable. My project on twentieth-century Mexican mystical poetry addresses these questions in dialogue with literary theory, the cultural history of religion, theology, and Hispanic mystical traditions.</p>
<p>Materiality and transcendence are thus not opposing poles of my research, but complementary ways of interrogating the limits of representation. Objects, bodies, animals, and mystical experiences pose, from radically different positions, a common question: what can literature do when confronted with that which exceeds or resists conceptual capture? I am particularly interested in these thresholds, where language encounters a form of alterity that cannot be fully reduced to meaning, and where such resistance requires us to reconsider fundamental categories such as subjectivity, agency, presence, knowledge, and representation.</p>
<p>A further dimension of my work focuses on print culture, archives, and the recovery of materials neglected by canonical literary histories. I have worked extensively with periodicals, newspapers, visual materials, and texts with limited or ephemeral circulation, and I am currently developing projects in critical editing and archival recovery. In this area, I am particularly interested in the intersection of philology, literary history, and the digital humanities, as well as in the potential of digital tools to reconstruct fragmented, dispersed, or historically overlooked corpora.</p>
<p>My most recent research extends these concerns into contemporary literature and the study of embodiment, motherhood, care, and attention, asking how literary forms render visible vulnerability, dependency, and the limits of knowledge. Taken together, my work develops a sustained inquiry into the boundaries of literary representation and into literature’s capacity to produce knowledge precisely where language and experience come into tension: between matter and transcendence, human and nonhuman, body and spirit, presence and absence, archive and silence.</p>
-
Nueva revista de filología hispánica, Liturgia y modernidad poética: los haikais de Alfonso Castro Pallares en Ábside
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2027ISSN or title: 0185-0121 -
Mitologías Hoy, Un museo portátil
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2026Start page: 24 End page: 42 Vol.: 34DOI: 10.5565/rev/mitologias.1239 ISSN or title: 2014-1130 -
Literatura mexicana, Palabras, objetos y Nación: las Exposiciones Universales y la ‘novela-museo’ de Manuel Payno. Una relectura de Los bandidos de Río Frío
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 71 End page: 100 Vol.: 35 No.: 2ISSN or title: 0188-2546 -
Hispania Sacra, Apuntes para una historia de la prensa católica mexicana en la primera mitad del siglo XX
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 1 End page: 9 Vol.: 76 No.: 153ISSN or title: 0018-215X -
La Colmena, Consumo delirante: los objetos degenerados del modernismo mexicano. Una lectura de Por donde se sube al cielo (1882) de Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 17 End page: 32 No.: 122 -
Bibliographica, Contribuciones de la revista Ábside a los estudios de bibliografía mexicana
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2023Start page: 291 End page: 312 Vol.: 6 No.: 1 -
(an)ecdótica, Apuntes acerca de la genealogía de Tardes nubladas. Colección de novelas (1871) de Manuel Payno
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2020Start page: 9 End page: 29 Vol.: 4 No.: 2 -
Revista Landa, Notas acerca de Las Hortensias: la vidriera de la memoria
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2015Start page: 190 End page: 210 Vol.: 3 No.: 2 -
Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies, La Ocasión de Juan José Saer: hacia una tensión entre espíritu y materia
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2010Start page: 287 End page: 298 Vol.: 8 -
The Journal of Lusophone Studies, Princesa: The Textual Space between Translation and Divergence
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2010Start page: 75 End page: 90 Vol.: 8 -
Psychoanalysis and history, Freud in Trieste: Journey to an Ambiguous City
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2010Start page: 129 End page: 151 Vol.: 12 No.: 2DOI: 10.3366/pah.2010.000 ISSN or title: 1460-8235
-
Objetos itinerantes. Ficción y cultura material en el México decimonónico
Publishing date: 2024 Isbn: 978-607-30-8883-1
-
La disciplina de escuchar: Merton traducido por Cardenal. Poesía y traducción. La pasión inalcanzable
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2026 -
Ritmos de modernidad. Tecnología, medios y crítica cultural en la obra de Amado Nervo. Más allá de los géneros literarios Cruces, textos híbridos, écfrasis
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2026 -
Manuel Payno y Le Nouveau Monde. Manuel Payno. Letras, viajes, política y placeres
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 41 End page: 50ISBN: 978-607-30-8827-5 -
Prólogo. Manuel pain. Letras, viajes, política y placeres
Name: Gandolfi, Laura; Castro, M. Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 15 End page: 20 -
Recorrido por los caminos de Payno. Manuel Payno. Letras, viajes, política y placeres
Name: Gandolfi, Laura; Arenas, J. Role: Autor Publishing date: 2024Start page: 257 End page: 301ISBN: 978-607-30-8827-5 -
El túnel e lo scandalo del matricidio: convergenza/divergenza di due miti.. Scandalo: Quaderni di Synapsis VIII
Name: Gandolfi, Laura Role: Autor Publishing date: 2009Start page: 246 End page: 255
Course 2026-2027 - Period: 01/09/2026 - 31/08/2027
-
Bachelor's Degree
Bachelor's Degree in Humanities and Cultural Studies- - Studies of Area I: Literature