María Auxiliadora Castillo Soto holds an Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree in Women’s and Gender Studies (GEMMA) from the universities of Granada in Spain and Łódź in Poland. She also holds a Master’s Degree in World Languages, Literature, and Linguistics from West Virginia University in the United States. Her research has focused on the teaching of English and Spanish as second languages, and literary analyses with an interdisciplinary perspective. In a broader sense, her research interests span feminist literary criticism, migration studies, transnational literature, postcolonial studies, and gender studies. Her teaching experience at the university level has ranged from teaching English and Spanish to Latin American culture and introductory gender studies courses. For the EUTERPE Project: European Literatures and Gender from a Transnational Perspective, María Auxiliadora’s research analyzes how daily embodiments of transnational self-identified women serve as adaptation and survival strategies in the host countries, and how these same strategies may also represent a sense of autonomy, power, and resistance. The project focuses on the analysis of non-fictional autobiographical works written by transnational subjects who have migrated and resettled in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom to identify the different ways in which these embodiments challenge European belonging and identification.

Contributions:

Challenging European Identity: Representations of Female Transnational Experiences in Marrón by Rocío Quillahuaman

Challenging the Idea of Europe: Representations of Female Transnational Experiences in Chérissa Iradukunda's Broken Object

Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Maria Auxiliadora Castillo Soto. 2025. "Postcolonial Intellectuals: Exploring Belonging Across Borders in Igiaba Scego’s La mia casa è dove sono (My Home Is Where I Am)" Social Sciences 14, no. 4: 209. 

Andrea Abreu's Dogs of Summer: An in-depth exploration of working-class adolescenthood