Ximena Cervantes Englerth, M.Ed.
Ximena is a doctoral candidate and researcher of the ERC Starting Grant project AFROEUROPECYBERSPACE at U Bremen.
Within the ERC project, she explores the intersections of multiple discriminatory regimes affecting Afrodiasporic communities and conducts an analysis of major Afrofeminist websites in Spain and the Americas. Her work will provide important insights into gendered perspectives of the African diaspora in Europe and help us understand how ICTs foster the visibility of multiply marginalized groups.
In her master’s thesis, using the examples of Margaryta Yakovenko’s Desencajda and Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio’s Hija del camino, she investigated literary representations of conflictive identities in autofictions written by contemporary Spanish female authors with ‘migration background’.
Ximena studied Hispanic studies and Philosophy and holds a Master’s Degree in Education from the Universities of Oldenburg and Bremen. For several years, she has worked as a student assistant for the Spanish didactic journal Hispanorama1 and the project “The Spanish Black Diaspora: Afro-Spanish Literature of the 20th and 21st Century”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, project no. 353492083[^2]). She was the leading student assistant in the organizing team of the international conference “Personas africanas en la Península Ibérica ayer y hoy: proyecciones y posicionamientos en la literature, el arte y los medios”[^3] and responsible for the layout of the essay collection Personas africanas y afrodescendientes en España ayer y hoy: proyecciones y posicionamientos en la literature, el arte y los medios (edited by Julia Borst and Danae Gallo González. Open Access, De Gruyter, 2024).
Her research interests focus on contemporary Spanish-language artistic and cultural productions that represent forms of resistance to Western systems of oppression. Among others, she is also interested in postcolonial theories, intersectional feminism, postmodern migration, the critique of neoliberalism, literary and digital activism as well as constructions of femininity and masculinity.