PhD, Hispanic Studies, University of British Columbia (2001)

Biography

Litsa Chatzivasileiou has worked as an assistant professor at the Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia and is currently teaching as a sessional instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice. She specializes on theories of subjectivity with a special focus on philosophical and ethical issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, post-colonial studies, indigenous women’s writing (including autobiography, experimental life stories, and testimony) and cultural studies on women, consumption, and corporeality. She also teaches courses on women in culture with a special emphasis on feminist fictions of utopias/dystopias, apocalypse and social justice working with film and literature of the fantastic, sci-fi, and post-apocalyptic narratives in conjunction with post-colonial theory. She has a soft spot for all kinds of cultural “monsters”, is an avid bookworm, an incurable movie goer, and loves talking politics. She is a softy for her students and she knows that there is nothing else that she could have ever been in her life but a teacher.

Research

My research interests focus on philosophical and ethical issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality, post-colonial studies, whiteness and masculinity studies, and indigenous women’s writing (including autobiography and testimony), cultural studies on women, consumption, and corporeality.

My dissertation specialized on feminist philosophy and was titled Hetærography or Inventions of Radical Alterity: Reading Two Latin American Women’s Poetry. It examined the work written by two contemporary Latin American women. I developed concepts introduced by Derrida and Levinas to discuss their literature in relation to feminist debates about identity and difference/alterity. My dissertation formulated the philosophical and theoretical construction (or invention) of a radical heterogeneity called herehetærography, and proposed a reading of this work based on the radical alterity of woman.

Other research interests include cultural studies, feminist philosophies of otherness and difference, and deconstructive and ethico-political approaches to diasporic women’s cultural production, discursive representations, sociocultural conceptions, ideologies, language and rhetoric of the gendered, sexed or racialized body in discourses from diasporic communities. My most recent research has also focused on popular culture, sci-fi and fantasy film and fiction, children’s literature and animation, and youth culture.

Selected Publications

“On Bullshit and the Possibility of Hope.” Women Suffrage and Beyond (July 17/2013)

http://womensuffrage.org/?p=21893

and in:

The F Word Feminist Media Collective (June 24/2013)

http://www.feminisms.org/blog/

“ ‘Open Your Mouth to Receive the Host of the Wounded Word:’ Passion(s) of Liberation Theology.” Angelaki (March 2006).

“Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s: The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga.” Feminist Theory: An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 5 1 (2004).

“(Ge)stating CyberMothers in Four E-mails and One Parable.” Atlantis 26 1 (Fall 2001): 13–19.

“Stuffing the Other: Tropes of Incorporation in Coco Fusco’s and Nao Bustamante’s Stuff.”Latin American Theatre Review, 34 2 (Spring 2001): 73–94.

“I G-hoest Therefore I Am: The Gift of Hunger.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 21 3 (December 2000): 283–95.

Under The Shade of an Olive Tree: Feminist Conversations on Greek Diaspora. (In preparation).  Edited collection of essays and artwork in collaboration with Anna Carastathis.

Dr. Litsa Chatzivasileiou has a PhD in Hispanic Studies with a specialization in feminist philosophy and cultural theory, in particular post-structuralism and post-colonial studies. She has worked as an assistant professor at the Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia and is currently teaching as a sessional instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice.