Sarah Revilla-Sanchez

About

I am a PhD candidate in Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Soy mexicana y vivo en Vancouver. I have an interdisciplinary background in Sociology, Comparative Literatures, and Cultural Management. As a graduate student, I’m a huge advocate for work-life balance, and I don’t work on weekends!

Current literary obsession: Amparo Dávila’s short stories
Favourite time of the day: Morning coffee with my husband Gian Carlo
Next goal: Run a marathon in 2025
Apps I use to stay organized: Todoist and iCloud Calendar

Research

My doctoral research lies at the intersection of gender-based violence, contemporary Mexican Gothic fiction, and feminism. Other research interests include Testimony, Digital Humanities, and Sound Studies.

My dissertation tracks how contemporary literary works by Mexican women are increasingly engaging with the Gothic mode to grapple with gender-based violence. Drawing on Gothic and Horror Studies, Gender Theories, and Feminist Studies, I demonstrate that the authors in my corpus not only capture and portray the horrors of patriarchal violence, but they do so in ways that expose the entanglement among gender, class, race, politics, and neoliberal logic. Check out this article to find out more about my research!

Other projects

The Adaptive TEI Network: Antiracist, Decolonial, and Inclusive Markup Interventions

I’m collaborating with other graduate students, faculty, and DH librarians at UBC and SFU to co-write a new TEI schema that attends to antiracist, decolonial, inclusive, and feminist practices for encoding and analyzing texts in digital form. I’m currently learning XML-TEI.

Find out more about our work here and check out the poster I presented recently at the Text Encoding Initiative conference in October 2024.

(Re)appearing the Desaparecidos: Testimonial Mural Art and Intergenerational Trauma of the Argentinean Dictatorship (1976–1983)

Since 2020, I have been working as a Research Assistant under the supervision of Dr. Cristina Santos and Dr. Adriana Spahr. This interdisciplinary project examines Argentinean testimonial art production and testimonies. As part of my duties, I am transcribing and translating (Spanish/English) testimonies. As a research team, we travelled to Buenos Aires to conduct field work (June 2022) and co-organized an international conference in Canada. Read more about that event here.

Sound and the Humanities Research Cluster (2022-2024)

I worked as a Research Assistant for my supervisor, Dr. Tamara Mitchell. In addition to maintaining the cluster’s website, I co-facilitated discussions in reading groups, and created a podcast episode! Coming soon.

Publications

Refereed publications:

“La Llorona Hauntings: Storytelling Feminicide at the Purgatorial Mexico/US Border.” Female Identity in Contemporary Fictional Purgatorial Worlds, edited by Simon Bacon, Bloomsbury, 2023, pp. 55–68. Coauthored with Cristina Santos.
“Witches, Stepmothers and Princesses: Rethinking Gender and Money in NBC’s Grimm TV Series.” Grimm Realities. Essays on Identity and Justice in the Television Series,edited by Daniel Farr and Melanie D. Holm, McFarland Books, 2023, pp 140–154.

Non-refereed publications:

Review of Gothic Imagination in Latin American Fiction and Film (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) by Carmen A. Serrano. A Contracorriente: Una revista de estudios latinoamericanos, vol. 19 no. 3, May 2022, pp. 403-407.
Review of Men, Masculinities, and Popular Romance (Routledge, 2019) by Jonathan A. Allan. Popular Culture Studies Journal, vol. 10 no. 1, April 2022, pp. 374-376.
Haunting Murders: Feminicide, Ghosts, and Affects in Contemporary Mexico. University of Victoria, 2021. (MA thesis.)

Teaching and resources

Resources:

Slides for teaching inclusive language in Spanish classes:

Mentorship:

Senior TA. Fall 2024 & Spring 2025 @ UBC.
International TA Consultant. Fall 2020 & Spring 2021 @ UVic.

TAing:

SPAN 102: Beginners’ Spanish II. Spring 2025 @ UBC.
SPAN 101: Beginners’ Spanish I. Fall 2024 @ UBC.
SPAN 102: Beginners’ Spanish II. Spring 2024 @ UBC.
SPAN 101: Beginners’ Spanish I. Fall 2023 @ UBC.
RMST 201: Introduction to Literatures and Cultures of the Romance World I: Medieval to Early Modern. Fall 2022 @ UBC.
PORT 405: Studies in Portuguese and Brazilian Culture. Spring 2022 @ UBC.
SOCI 389: Death and Dying. Fall 2020 & Summer 2021 @ UVic.
SOCI 281: Sociology of Genders. Spring 2020 & Spring 2021 @ UVic.
OCI 331: Political Sociology: Sociological Theories of the State and Resistance. Summer 2020 & Spring 2021 @ UVic.
CS 101: Canadian Studies and Advanced English. Summer 2020 & Summer 2021 @ UVic.
SOCI 285: Sociology of Health Over the Life Course. Fall 2019 @ UVic.
SPAN 1F00: Introductory Spanish Language. Fall 2017 & Spring 2018 @ Brock.

Instructor:

SPAN 1F00, Introductory Spanish Language. Summer 2023 @ Brock University. (Online.)
Publishing Seminar. Spring 2019 @ Vértice Anáhuac México.
Literary Criticism in Italian. Spring 2019 @ Anáhuac México.
Advanced English Language. Fall 2018 & Spring 2019 @ Anáhuac México.

Contact

revillas[at]student[dot]ubc[dot]ca
Page at UBC FHIS.