Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

Patricia Novillo-Corvalan is an Argentinian scholar and Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. She is the Head of Comparative Literature, Division of Arts and Humanities. Prior to her appointment at Kent, she held teaching fellowships at Birkbeck College, University of London and University College London.

Patricia’s research explores issues of identity, nation, empire, race, and gender through the idea of writers’ networks, circulations, afterlives, and receptions, particularly in relation to Latin America, Ireland, India, and British modernism. Her research is intrinsically comparative and interdisciplinary, and it engages with current theories of world literature.

Patricia's first monograph, Borges and Joyce: An Infinite Conversation (2011) is a comparative investigation that examines the nexus between Jorge Luis Borges and James Joyce, writers renowned for their polyglot abilities, prodigious memories, cyclical conception of time, and labyrinthine creations, both of whom wrote from the ‘peripheral’ urban spaces of late-colonial Ireland and post-colonial Argentina.

Her second book, Modernism and Latin America: Transnational Networks of Literary Exchange (2018) is a study of how empire affected the networks and alliances of Latin American, Irish, and British modernist writers, engaging with the politics of world literature through histories of reception, translation, and circulation.

Her current book project – The View from the South: Latin American Modernism and the Southern Imagination – situates modernism within a world-literature framework. It invites us to view literary modernism from a southern perspective by rotating the world’s map from North to South, from centre to periphery, enabling the exploration of south-south alternative encounters.  

Patricia's comparative research is located at the intersections between Modernist Studies, Comparative and World Literature, and Latin American Studies. She has received research funding from a variety of bodies, including the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England, the British Academy, the Wellcome Trust, the Society for Irish Migration Studies in Latin America, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Patricia is the editor of Virginia Woolf, Europe, and Peace: Transnational Circulations (with Ariane Mildenberg) (South Carolina: Clemson University Press, 2020) and the pioneering collection of essays: Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine (Routledge, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature Series, 2015).

Patricia has published cutting-edge comparative articles in internationally leading journals, including Textual Practice, Woolf Studies Annual, Journal of World Literature, Modernist Cultures, Modern Language Review, Comparative Literature, and Variaciones Borges, among others.

Patricia convened the ‘Magazine and World Literature’ monthly Webinar Series, together with Professor Francesca Orsini (SOAS; MULOSIGE) between 2020-21. The webinar series aimed to expand our discussion of world literature to a consideration of the crucial role of magazines, and the particular configurations and happenstance visions and experiences of world literature they produced.

In June 2019, she was the organiser (co-organiser, Professor Francesca Orsini, SOAS) of the University of Kent Comparative Literature Summer School. Funded by the Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-east England (CHASE), the event offered intensive doctoral training in the principles and practices of Comparative Literature to students working on comparative and interdisciplinary projects. The summer school developed a new conceptual model that provided innovative responses to current world literature debates, including the introduction of new methodologies, such as horizontal comparativism and global South paradigms.

Patricia served as External Examiner for the MSc programme in Comparative Literature of the University of Edinburgh between 2018-2022.  

Invited papers, lectures, and presentations

Patricia has been invited to deliver research papers, keynotes, and lectures at University College London, University of Bristol, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of Glasgow, University of York, University of Kent, Rose Theatre Kingston, Institute of Modern Languages (Senate House), British Comparative Literature Association, and Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), among others. Internationally, she has been invited to speak at academic events in Germany, France, Spain, Ireland, India, Luxembourg, and Argentina.

In October 2020, Patricia appeared on the BBC’s THE FORUM programme entitled Jorge Luis Borges: Mixing the Magical with the Mundane, alongside Professor Evelyn Fishburn (University College London) and Professor Edwin Williamson (University of Oxford).  

Patricia teaches at undergraduate level on world literature, Latin American fiction, the tale, and global Shakespeares. 

Patricia has supervised doctoral students to successful completion and is currently supervising students working on topics related to world literature, transnational modernism, Latin American studies, and medical humanities. She would be happy to take new PhD students working on the following areas: comparative and world literature, Latin American literature and culture, transnational modernisms, medical humanities, and the global South.