Patricia Vilches earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. She is Professor of Spanish and Italian at Lawrence University, from which she retired. Her research focuses on Latin American cultural history, socio-political literary studies, material culture, and space studies with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Chile, through the work of Alberto Blest Gana, and twentieth-century Chile through Salvador Allende, Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, and the Nueva Canción Chilena. Her publications include Blest Gana via Machiavelli and Cervantes: National Identity and Social Order in Chile (Cambridge Scholars 2017); an edited volume on Parra, titled Mapping Violeta Parra’s Cultural Landscapes, to which she also contributed a chapter (Palgrave McMillan 2018). She has also edited and contributed a chapter to the book Negotiating Space in Latin America (Brill 2020). Vilches edited and contributed a chapter to Blest Gana at 100,published by Open Cultural Studies (2021). This latter piece explores the social space of nineteenth-century Santiago, with themes that include the marketplace, consumerism, and sensorial stimuli. Vilches’s current research is on Chilean twentieth-century cultural and musical history via spatial, material, and geographical mapping.
