Phd in STUDIES IN MEDIAEVAL PHILOLOGY, PALEOGRAPHY, ROMANCE
STUDIES

email: lucy.bell@uniroma1.it
phone:
building: Marco Polo
room: 333

Born in the UK in 1986, Lucy graduated from the University of Cambridge (UK) with a Bachelor’s Degree in Modern Languages (French and Spanish) in 2008, coming top of her year in Modern Languages. She stayed at the University of Cambridge for her higher degrees and went on to pass an MPhil in European Literature and Culture (with Distinction) in 2009, and graduated from her PhD (Cantab) in 2013 with a thesis entitled “Configurations of the Fragment: The Latin American Short Story at its Limits”. Between 2013 and 2022, she was a Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, in Spanish and Translation at the University of Surrey (UK). Since 2022, she is a Researcher at Sapienza, the University of Rome.

Building on her foundations in Latin American literary and cultural studies and theory, she has developed an international reputation for cutting-edge research that sheds new light on the connections between literature, culture and social transformation: on how literature and culture reflect social and political change, and most compellingly on how literature and culture are capable of producing social transformation. Working extensively in marginalized communities – from indigenous communities to imprisoned women in Mexico and from urban waste-picking collectives to young people in isolated rural communities in Brazil – she has gained a deep understanding of the new forms, meanings and social relations generated through literary and cultural processes in these contexts.

Her first book is entitled The Latin American Short Story at its Limits: Fragmentation, Hybridity and Intermediality (London & New York: Legenda / Routledge, 2014). Her second book, of which she is principal author, is entitled Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2022, co-authored with Alex Ungprateeb Flynn & Patrick O’Hare). It won a LASA (Latin American Studies Association) book prize in 2023. It is the first monographic book devoted to editoriales cartoneras, and the first book resulting from a sustained collaboration between literary critics (Bell) and social anthropologists (Flynn and O'Hare). She has also published extensively in international journals and edited volumes. Her research has been supported by large and small grants from the United Kingdom – Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Global Challenges Research Fund, United Kingdom Research & Innovation, BBC Arts, the Prison Reform Trust – and the Secretaría de la Cultura (Mexico).

With the support of these institutions, she has designed and led two major cutting-edge, international research projects: “Cartonera Publishing: Relations, Meaning and Community in Movement” (2017-2020) and “Prisoner Publishing: Supporting Rehabilitation and Reform through Innovative Writing Programmes” (2020-2022). As part of these two very successful projects, she has created a ground-breaking “transformal” methodology that brings together literary analysis with action research, thus creating new bridges of academic knowledge between literature, anthropology and activism.