Sara Villamarín Freire 

Sara Villamarín Freire is a ‘Xunta de Galicia’ postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Sara earned her PhD in Advanced English Studies from the University of A Coruña (2022) with the dissertation Against the Dominant Fiction: Seeking Alternatives to Hegemonic Fatherhood in Contemporary U.S. Literature, recipient of the PhD Extraordinary Award (“premio extraordinario de doctorado”) granted by UDC in 2023. Between 2017 and 2021 her PhD research was funded through a contract sponsored by the Galician regional government. Moreover, she was a member of the junior research team in the projects “Literature and Globalization: American Literature from a Transnational Perspective” (FFI2015-66767-P; 2016-2019) and “Literature and Globalization 2: Communities of Waste” (PID2019-106798GBI00; 2020-2023), having been hired as a research assistant for the latter (2021-2022).
Currently Sara is a visiting researcher at the Narrative Research Lab in Aarhus University (Denmark). In years prior she was visiting researcher at the John F. Kennedy Center for North American Studies (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany), University of Santiago de Compostela (as part of the postdoctoral fellowship ‘Margarita Salas’) and SELMA – Center for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory (University of Turku, Finland). Sara has published her research in journals such as REN, Miscelánea, IJES or Complutense Journal of English Studies, as well as in the volumes Transcending the Postmodern (eds. Susana Onega e Jean-Michel Ganteau, 2020) and The Routledge Companion to Masculinity in American Literature and Culture (ed. Lydia Cooper, 2021). Together with Dr. Elsa del Campo, she has co-edited the monograph “Toxic Tales: Narratives of Waste in Postindustrial North America” which appeared in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 86 (2023). In 2022 she received the ‘Best Conference Paper’ distinction in the 8th ASYRAS Conference. In 2023 she won the ‘Emory Elliott Award’ granted by the International American Studies Association. Her research interests lie in the representation of father figures in contemporary US literature, the post-postmodern turn in Anglophone literatures at the turn of the millennium, and the study of narrative identity/identity as narrative.