Figlerowicz Matylda

Contact Information

matyldafiglerowicz@fas.harvard.edu

Office Hours: Th. 1-3pm, by appointment, see Calendly link

Websites

Role

Matylda Figlerowicz

Interim Director of Undergraduate Studies, Fall 2024

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Research Interests: I analyze 20th– and 21st-century works of literature and visual arts that cross geographic and disciplinary boundaries, and shape new modes of cultural and political critique. Ranging across ten languages, my research is broadly comparative in fields of Latin American, Peninsular, Indigenous, and Latinx studies, as well as World Literature. It also branches into Visual Studies, Art History, and Slavic literatures.

An important part of my research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of multilingual literature. In my most recent project, Anticlimax: The Multilingual Novel at the Turn of the Millennium, I work on novels written by authors from multilingual territories marked by the dominant presence of Spanish––Latin America, Spain, and Equatorial Guinea––published in the last three decades (1990-2021). As I study novels written in and between different languages of those regions, I propose to see multilingualism as an essential––yet often overlooked­­––dimension of critical theory, and a crucial element of literary studies.

My first book, La memoria en construcción, offers a comparative study of Catalan, Spanish, and Polish literatures of the 1960s. It explores strategies of constructing memory in the context of linguistic conflicts, political oppression, and exile, while conceptualizing memory through the lenses of queer theory and affect studies. My current project, Becoming Lady Light: The Revolutions of Luz Jiménez, is dedicated to the life and work Luz Jiménez, a central Nahua intellectual and cultural figure, most often known as “the most painted woman of Mexico.” The project studies the visual material—the artworks where Jiménez is represented, together with the texts she authored. I ask how to learn from this vast corpus of visual, literary, and historical material in order to shape new spaces for cultural analysis.

Education and Previous Appointments: Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2021-2024); Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Harvard University (2021); M.A. in Spanish Language and Literature, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (2014); M.A. in Art History, Universitat de Barcelona (2013); B.A. in Art History, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (2012); B.A. in Spanish Language and Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan (2011)