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Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics

 

Dr Sandra Velásquez-Alford

Photo of Sandra
Position(s): 
Spanish Supervisor
Substitute Translation Teacher
Affiliated Lecturer
Department/Section: 
Spanish & Portuguese
Contact details: 
Telephone number: 
(3) 35005
Location: 

Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages
Raised Faculty Building
University of Cambridge
Sidgwick Avenue
Cambridge
CB3 9DA
United Kingdom

 

About: 

 

Sandra completed her undergraduate degrees in Literature (2008) and in History (2011) at the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia, where she obtained the honour Magna cum Laude in 2011. Since then, her research has featured interdisciplinary analysis, focusing on the interactions between literature and history in Latin American literature of the 20th century. She pursued an MPhil in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge where she explored the historical re-interpretation in Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘Macondo cycle’. Her PhD (2019) examines the interplay between history and fiction in the works of Carlos Fuentes and Alejo Carpentier. Currently, she is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Section of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Cambridge. Sandra has also supervised numerous papers of the undergraduate TRIPOS in Spanish since 2014.

 

Teaching interests: 

 

SPB2 – Translation into English

SP1 – Introduction to the Languages, Literatures and Cultures of the Spanish Speaking World

SPA3 – Introduction to Hispanic Literature (ab initio)

SP5 – Latin American Culture and History.

SP12 – Latin American Culture

 

Research interests: 

 

Modern Latin American Literature and Culture

Latin American Literature 20th century

Cultural history

History of food

 

Recent research projects: 

 

Sandra's doctoral thesis presented a comparative analysis of the literary writings of Alejo Carpentier (1904-80) and Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012) with regards to the literary reinterpretation of historical topics in their works. In particular, she analysed the historical tropes of Conquest and Revolution, which often appear as central concerns throughout Fuentes’s and Carpentier’s literary and critical writings. The dissertation engaged in a multi-fold study of these works, as the comparative analysis is both between disciplines (literature and history) and writers. On the one hand, she analysed the critical relationship established by both authors to the traditional historiographies of their own countries. On the other hand, she compared both approaches by highlighting similarities and differences in Fuentes’s and Carpentier’s literary interpretations of similar historical topics and sources. This interdisciplinary analysis demonstrated the existence of a critical relationship to traditional historiography and thus a central concern on revisiting Latin American history within their literature.

 

Published works: 

 

Reviews

Velásquez-Alford, S.L. (2018). ‘El efecto caleidoscopio: Colección Gabriel García Márquez, genio universal del Caribe’, in Boletín Cultural y Bibliográfico, Banco de la República, Colombia (forthcoming June 2019).

 

 

Web-based publications

Velásquez-Alford, S.L. (24th July 2015) ‘Mad Madge in the Attic at King’s College’ [Blog post] in King’s treasures.