Murray Edwards College
Huntingdon Road
Cambridge
CB3 0DF
Liesbeth François is Lorna Close Lecturer in Spanish and Director of Studies at Murray Edwards College. She holds a PhD in Literature, awarded by KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium). She specializes in contemporary Latin American literature and culture, mainly from Mexico and Argentina. After working as a postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven for seven years, she joined the University of Cambridge in 2022 as a teaching associate in Modern Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies.
She teaches and supervises on papers with a Latin American component at undergraduate level, and in the MPhil programmes in Latin American Studies and in Literature, Culture and Thought.
She is the author of Andares vacilantes. La caminata en la obra narrativa de Sergio Chejfec (Beatriz Viterbo, 2018) and Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature (Palgrave, 2021). She has published articles on several Latin American authors and co-edited three volumes on, respectively, the everyday, urban space and re-imaginations of class in contemporary literature and culture.
- 20th and 21st century Latin American literature
- Contemporary Latin American visual art
Contemporary Latin American literature and visual art, especially from Mexico and Argentina, and with a focus on the following topics:
- Space in narrative fiction
- The city in literature
- Imaginaries of the underground
- Geological aesthetics
- Radical democracy
- Community and collectivity
Key publications include:
Monographs:
- Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).
- Andares vacilantes. La caminata en la obra narrativa de Sergio Chejfec (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2018).
Co-edited volumes:
- Rys, Michiel and Liesbeth François (eds.). Re-imagining Class: Intersectional Perspectives on Class Identity and Precarity in Contemporary Culture (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2024).
- Recorridos urbanos: horizontalidad y verticalidad en los imaginarios de la ciudad en la literatura latinoamericana contemporánea. Edited by María Paz Oliver and Liesbeth François. Special issue of Iberoromania (94), 2021.
- Espacio y cotidianidad en la narrativa contemporánea. Edited by Liesbeth François and María Paz Oliver. Special issue of Interférences Littéraires (13), 2014.
