Student profile: Viola

PhD candidate at the School of Arts, Media and Communication, funded via the AHRC Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.

Please tell us about your journey to doing a PhD

I found my drive for research during my master’s degree in American Modern Literature at the University of Glasgow: it was at that time that I first read Chicana author Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and developed a keen interest in Chicana and Mexican literature, leading me to write my dissertation on depictions of identity in contemporary feminist Chicana literature. At the same time, I began to develop my own ideas about existing decolonial feminist representations in poetry and fiction and subsequently to develop my argument for my PhD project, which includes both literary analysis and qualitative research situated in the Mexican context.

Tell us about your PhD project

In my PhD project, I interweave the study of feminist literature about the gendered colonial history of Mexico with narratives learned from the experiences of feminist grassroots activism. Accordingly, my interdisciplinary research consists of literary analysis of fictionalised depictions of the historical figure of La Malinche written by both Spanish-speaking Mexican and English-speaking Mexican American authors alongside in-person fieldwork with Mexican transfeminist NGO, Igualdad Sustantiva Yucatan. I do so to grapple with contemporary decolonial feminist debates around gender-based violence, agency, and identity, and to move towards a decolonial feminist practice that goes beyond the academic sphere as the image depicting a moment from one of my focus groups with Igualdad Sustantiva Yucatan should illustrate.

What advice would you give to people thinking about applying for a PhD?

There’s no one way to do things, as no two PhD experiences will look the same! Before I started back in 2022, I had been repeatedly told that the nature of research is to change and evolve, but I had no idea that the process of going back to earlier ideas, redrafting, and taking a break from writing to figure out if my argument is going where I want it to go would be so vital to my PhD journey. I grew and evolved both as a researcher and as a human being alongside my project, and this is one of the most important takeaways for me. Be curious, be flexible, and never forget to actually enjoy the ride!