Maria Victoria Cogorno
Newnham College
Research topic: Literature and history of Nation-building in Argentina, from the perspective of biopolitics
Supervisor: Dr Carlos Fonseca
Email: mvc35@cam.ac.uk
Biography
I was born and raised in Argentina where I completed my undergraduate programme in Humanities at Universidad de San Andrés (Buenos Aires) in 2019. I graduated Summa Cum Laude and my main interests included political philosophy, literature, and Latin American history.
After graduating, I moved to the UK to complete a Master’s programme in Latin American Studies thanks to the Latin American Centre's Argentine Studies Scholarship. At Oxford, I studied the Argentinian process of Nation-building from the perspective of biopolitics, combining my passions for philosophy and history. I also studied different understandings of race in the Argentinian literature published around the same period. I graduated from Oxford with a Distinction and I have received the opportunity to continue developing these research interests in a PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Research
My current research is focused on how power is exercised on biology and the human body in late XIXc and early XXc Argentina. I study the history of eugenic policy and the development of the modern state and its mechanisms of population control in Argentina, together with the influence of positivism and cientificismo. I combine this ‘Foucaultian’ strand of analysis with the study of animality and ‘hybridisation’ in literature, and its political implications, building a bridge between history, literature, and politics.
My PhD is funded by The Cambridge Trust & Newnham College.