Liliana Chávez Díaz is a Mexican scholar and author. She holds a PhD in Spanish from the University of Cambridge and a Master’s in Latin American Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her research and writing focuses on contemporary Latin American literature and journalism, particularly women's, nonfiction and travel writing.

Before coming to St Andrews, Dr Chávez Díaz was a Georg Forster Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, working on a postdoctoral project on women’s testimonial and travel writing in the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She is certified as an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in the UK and as a Researcher Level 1 in the National Researchers System in Mexico.

She has been an Associate Professor in Latin American Sociology and Mexican Culture at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana – Azcapotzalco Unit in Mexico City and Lecturer in World Literature at Tecnológico de Monterrey – Campus Sonora Norte. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Texas - Austin, Columbia University in New York and the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut in Berlin.

She is the author of the books Latin American Documentary Narratives: The Intersections of Storytelling and Journalism in Contemporary Literature (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021) and of Viajar sola: Identidad y experiencia de viaje en autoras hispanoamericanas (Edicions de la Universitat de Barcelona, 2020).

She has also worked as a public servant in Communications offices and as a translator and editor for marketing agencies and media outlets. As a journalist for over ten years, she has published in print and online Latin American newspapers, focusing on arts, culture, science and environmental issues. She currently writes the biweekly column 'Viajar sola' in the cultural magazine Laberinto of Milenio newspaper.

Coming from a transdisciplinary background, between literary, cultural and media studies, I am especially interested in issues of self-identity and otherness as represented and/or performed in nonfiction narratives, engaging with debates on the complex relationship between reality and fiction. I am currently researching Latin American and Latina women’s testimonial writing and crónicas. My research departs from the exploration of the role of memory and imagination within the context of the social revolutions, particularly in Central America and the Caribbean.

In 2020 I published my first monograph, Viajar sola. Identidad y experiencia de viaje en autoras hispanoamericanas, with Universitat de Barcelona Edicions. In this book on Spanish-American women authors, I propose a more inclusive genealogy of Latin American travel writing, considering works and genres usually neglected by literary criticism, such as letters from Rosario Castellanos, travel notes of Rosario Ferré and Alejandra Pizarnik’s diaries. In 2021 Bloomsbury Academic published my second book, Latin Documentary Narratives: The Intersections of Storytelling and Journalism in Contemporary Literature, which is an updated version of my doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, theorizing the uses and ethical pitfalls of journalistic investigation in contemporary Latin American literature.

Research interests

Nonfiction, testimonial and documentary narratives; (literary) journalism and Hispanic media; truth, reality and fiction; Latin American crónica; literature and other disciplines; literature and other arts; women's writing; gender studies; transmedia storytelling; mobilities and travel writing; (auto)biographical genres; memory and the archive; metafiction and postmodern fiction; identity, self-representations and performativity.