Dr Lourdes Parra Lazcano

Biography

Dr Parra Lazcano is a Teaching Fellow at the School of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture. Her research focuses on women’s writing, travel writing, animal studies, and plant studies in Latin/x America, with her current work exploring Mexican travel writers and traditional plant healers.

She studied Communication Studies at the National Autonomous University of Mexico before pursuing further studies at the Universities of Groningen and Göttingen. She completed her PhD at the University of Leeds and worked there before joining the University of Aberdeen in the autumn of 2018.

Prizes and Awards

Best Undergraduate Lecturer (front runner, 2024/25)

Best Overall Course Award (nominee, 2024/25)

AHGBI-WISPS Dorothy Sherman-Severin Research Fellowship for Early-Career Researchers in Luso-Hispanic Studies (2021).

UK Scholar Research Support by the Society of Latin American Studies (2025).

Research Overview

Her research primarily focuses on Mexican literature, film, and visual culture, with a particular emphasis on Latinx narratives. She has explored the role of female travel writers from the 19th century to the present and has also examined Latin American written and visual texts through the lens of plant studies and diffractive practices.

Current Research

Her current research examines Mexican herbalists and medicinal plants.

Past Research

Her first book, Escritora, no hay camino: Performatividades transculturales de viajeras mexicanas (2025)  explores Mexican travel literature -from early nineteenth-century publications to the contemporary era- to reveal how the experiences of six women writers reconfigured perceptions of themselves and the foreign.

From a feminist and transcultural critique, this book delves into how Laura Méndez de Cuenca, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, María Luisa Puga, Esther Seligson and Myriam Moscona confront cultural normativity in their narratives, drawing on their cultural interactions in Spain, Germany, Kenya, England, Israel and Bulgaria, among other countries.

The cross-cultural performativities studied here allow us to analyse how the authors incorporate categories such as sex, gender, class, nationality and ethnicity in their works. The comparative chapters explore themes such as transatlantic intellectual exchanges, the border identities' critique of normativity, and the relationship of genealogy to literary and cultural re-appropriations. This book offers an analytical insight into how Mexican women writers have contributed to travel literature by subverting and reconfiguring their identity and relationship to the world.

Knowledge Exchange

Writer, There Is No Road: Transforming Travel into Literature - https://boydellandbrewer.com/blog/world-literature/writer-there-is-no-road-transforming-travel-into-literature/

Collaborative documentary about Community gardens - Rooted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5a2UphGmpk&list=PLtNdgVpOYExBnsgszbUbSOV0V3uqC6AOk

Collective exhibition - Plant teXts inspired by LatinX American writers https://www.abdn.ac.uk/llmvc/disciplines/spanish/collective-online-exhibition/

Museum exhibition - Day of the Deat Items https://leedsstar.co.uk/tag/lourdes-parra-lazcano/

Published poems -https://archivopdp.unam.mx/?view=article&id=5155