Laurisa Sastoque Pabón

Laura Isabel (Laurisa) Sastoque Pabón

Laura Isabel (Laurisa) Sastoque Pabón

Newnham College 
Email: lis23@cam.ac.uk  
Supervisor: Dr Geoffrey Kantaris


Biography

I am a scholar, digital cultural heritage practitioner, and creative writer born and raised in Bogota, Colombia. At 17, I moved to Evanston, Illinois to pursue my BA in History, Creative Writing, and a minor in Data Science. I first became interested in research through initiatives such as the Kaplan Humanities Program and the Posner Research Program, which encouraged me to think through questions in the humanities from my position in the world. My honors thesis in History cemented my interest in the histories of Colombian diasporas and their responses to drug-related stigmatization. My undergraduate project involved the compiling of hundreds of U.S. and Colombian newspaper sources that represented the perception of Colombian immigrants in the United States—a database which I hope to convert into a Linked Open Data project.

In 2023, I moved to Cambridge to pursue my MPhil in Digital Humanities as a Gates Cambridge Scholar where I examined geospatial methods to portray the layers of Colombian diasporic life in New York and London. This resulted in the foundations of a digital map that holds a palimpsest of diasporic narratives, and which I am continuing to build into a public history output. After my MPhil, I moved to Southampton to work in the Digital Humanities team as a Digital Preservation Lead, creating and delivering training on digital archives topics to professionals in the GLAM sector, and working on legacy media data recovery.

I have now started a PhD in Latin American studies funded by the Margaret Anstee Centre for Global Studies at Newnham College. I seek to build on my previous research activities to understand the narrative and spatial production of Colombian and related Latin American diasporas in urban centres such as New York, Miami, and London. Outside of academia, I enjoy fiction and poetry writing, and I dabble in musical performance such as the violin and DJing.


Research

My research focuses on Colombian and related Latin American diasporic communities in urban centres such as New York, Miami and London. I seek to understand responses to totalizing narratives from the media, state and society that essentialize and reduce migrants to involvement in criminal activities such as the transnational drug trade. By looking at body of literary, film, artistic, and testimony work from diasporic individuals, I hope to trace the imaginaries, conflicts, and negotiations that emerge between “official” history and identity-memory. I also hope to conduct interviews with community leaders, artists, and event organizers that seek to bring diasporic communities together in spaces for gathering and discussion, including digital spaces. I am interested in the kinds of conversations that take place in diasporic community spaces, and how people challenge, adopt, or transform hegemonic notions of Latinidad and migranthood. I also hold secondary research interests in urban Latin music and its socialization through digital platforms, and participate in numerous digital humanities projects in the spatial humanities and the archives sectors.


Selected publications

Creative Writing

  • Sastoque Pabon, Laura Isabel. “What Comes Next,” “Foreigner at Burger King and “Lo que Nos Tocó” In Covert Literary Magazine, Issue 5: Rest Yourself (2025): 51–53.