Biography
Diana Castilleja. Doctor in Hispanic studies from the Sorbonne University. She studied a degree in communication at the Tecnológico de Monterrey (ITESM CEM) as well as the Master's degree in Literature at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico.
She has been Research fellow at the KULeuven. She has also been guest professor at the universities of Ghent, Antwerp, Liege and the ULB in Belgium, as well as at the Université de Haute Alsace and the Jean-Jaurès University in Toulouse.
She is professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and at the Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles.
She is currently president of the Hispanist Association of Benelux AHBx (www.ahbx.eu) of which she was also a founding member in 2004.
She is also member of several interdisciplinary and/or interuniversity research groups, including PROSPÉRO at the University Saint-Louis and CLIC (Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings), DIGI (Brussels Platform for Digital Humanities) and the BCUS (Brussels Centre for Urban Studies) at the VUB as well as the FWO-funded Scientific Research Group “Literatures without Borders. A Historical-Comparative Study of Premodern Literary Transnationality”, hosted by RELICs (UGent), and BCUS (VUB).
She is also co-director (with Renata Enghels, UGent) of the research project CROS: Crossing the border between English and Spanish (www.cros.ugent.be).
She is the author of L'essai: perspectives théoriques et l'exemple hispano-américain (L’Harmattan, 2008). She is co-editor with Eugenia Helena Houvenaghel and Dagmar Vandebosch of two volumes over Hispanic Essay: El ensayo hispánico: cruces de géneros, síntesis de formas (Droz - Romanica Gandensia, 2012) and Ensayo hispánico y sociedad: Diálogos de un género en movimiento (Droz - Romanica Gandensia, 2014), and she is also coeditor with Renata Enghels and An Vande Casteele of Cruzando fronteras: español e inglés en contacto. Prácticas lingüísticas, ideologías e identidades (Aracne Editrice, forthcoming 2021), among other articles and publications.
Her research focuses on autobiographical discourse, autofiction, essay, historical novel, intermediality, comics, digital humanities, exile, theatre, migration in Spanish and Latin American literature (20th and 21th centuries) and/or in comparison with another literatures.