Isis Giraldo
SHF x CULTURAL STUDIES AWARD WINNER | 2023
Isis Giraldo (MPhil, Oxford; PhD, Lausanne) is a junior lecturer at the English Department of the University of Lausanne, where she teaches US and Caribbean literature in English and New American Studies. Her work belongs within the fields of cultural and media studies from critical approaches that recentre power and justice. Empirically, it has mostly focused on Colombia and aims at showing how mass media has helped maintain hegemony over stark imbalances of power along the axes of gender, race, and social class, and justify regimes of rule by a privileged few. Theoretically, it has aimed at connecting Northern feminist theories, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies with critical thought on gender, race, and coloniality as developed from within Latin America.
Aiming at carrying out certain geographical, epistemological, and terminological displacements, her latest research has focused on the global rise of far-right ideology in relation to the entrenchment of the ‘coloniality of power’, and to show how the Colombian case can be enlightening in that regard.
Her book —Regimes of Colombianidad: Beauty, Citizenship, and Sex (currently under review)— contextualises the historical significance of the individual body in the Colombian nation-building process since Independence to explore female subjectivity and abjection, citizenship, and ideological struggles around gender, race, social class, and sexuality in a variety of twenty-first-century mass media and cultural artefacts.
In 2024, Isis Giraldo obtained research leave funding from her home university’s equality office to work in the Stuart Hall Archive Project (SHAP) at the University of Birmingham, an interdisciplinary project that aims at using Hall’s archives (deposited in the Cadbury Library) to create a new space for dialogue between Hall’s intellectual and political legacy and contemporary questions arising from present conjunctures. Building on her own previous work around the imbalances in the production and circulation of knowledge, the importance of decolonising knowledge production, and critical pedagogy, Isis Giraldo will contribute to the work of SHAP, while developing her own project (involving translation studies, history of ideas, and digital humanities) on the influence of/resistance to cultural studies (in the Birmingham’s vein) in Latin America and France. In the framework of this collaboration, Isis Giraldo was further granted a Vanguard Visiting Fellowship from the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Birmingham for the autumn 2024.
Isis Giraldo writes in English, Spanish, and French, and her academic work has appeared in journals such as Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Theory (Best Essay Prize, 2016), Debate Feminista, Postcolonial Studies, Cultural Studies, Nouvelles Questions Féministes, Journal of Right-Wing Studies, and in academic books. She has also written for a larger public in two personal blogs (2011-2020; 2023-currently), the Zurich-based magazine Republik, and the Colombian platform Revista Sur, among others.
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