Short bio
Laura Bak is a Gender and Diversity Ph.D. student at the Universidad de Oviedo. She holds a B.A. in Literary Studies from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, with a minor in Philosophy, and an M.A in Literature from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work has focused on the problems and representations of space in exiled Latin American Jewish women’s autobiographical writing, emphasizing in the search and creation of places that have disappeared in the current geopolitical maps. Her research continues to explore the subject of ‘autocartography’ within life-writings by migrant women through the lens of counter-mapping, spatial justice, and geocriticism.
Research topic
The subject of imagination and representation of lost places in life-writings has been at the centre of my research trajectory. In this research phase, I plan to study how migrant women in Europe produce life-writings in an exercise of creating alternative representations of the spaces they inhabit and transit. I intend to designate this type of writing as counter-autocartographies as they challenge dominant cartographic representations and weave counter-maps that represent the perspective and understanding of the spaces dwelt by migrant women.