Natasha Tanna

Profile

Biography

Natasha Tanna is a Lecturer in World Literature and the Co-Director of the Modern Research School. She specialises in contemporary literary engagements with feminist, queer, and decolonial theory and activism. Her areas of expertise include Latin(x) American and Caribbean literature as well as Iberian literature in Spanish and Catalan. 

Natasha joined the Department in September 2021 and held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship until December 2022. Prior to coming to York, Natasha was a Research Fellow in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College London and Lecturer in Spanish and Director of Studies in Modern and Medieval Languages at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD in Spanish, MPhil in Latin American Studies, and BA in Modern and Medieval Languages at the University of Cambridge. Natasha has been a visiting researcher at the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios de Género (Gender Studies Centre) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City and at ADHUC, the Centre for Gender Studies at the Universitat de Barcelona. She has also taught English at the Universidad de Guanajuato in Mexico. 

Research

Overview

Natasha specialises in queer, feminist, and anti-racist approaches to literary, cultural, and social analysis. Her research focuses on Latin(x) America, the Caribbean, Spain, and Catalonia. She is the author of Queer Genealogies in Transnational Barcelona (Legenda, 2019), which was awarded the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland Publication Prize 2018. It centres on queer kinship, alternative communities, and migration between Barcelona and Latin America. As well as book chapters in English, Spanish, and Catalan, she has published articles in academic journals including Feminist Theory and Comparative Literature and essays in literary magazines such as Latin American Literature Today. 

From 2020-22, Natasha held a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for the project ‘Decolonial Feminisms in Contemporary Latin American Literature’. The project considers how individual and collaborative literary creation may be a tool for collective healing from experiences of violence, such as femicide, disappearance, and ecological destruction. Natasha analyses how the community-based nature of decolonial feminist activism (vs the emphasis on the individual in liberal feminisms) shapes creative forms in the region through collaborative processes, including co-authorship, plagiarism, translation, intertextuality, and anonymity. Connected to this project and funded by an ESRC Impact Acceleration Award and the University of York’s Place and Community Fund, she is working with Joey Whitfield (Cardiff) to support the autonomous indigenous (largely Tsotsil-speaking) organisation the Abejas de Acteal (Bees of Acteal) to complete a testimonial book and film about their community in Chiapas, Mexico.

Natasha is currently co-editing a volume provisionally titled Creaction: Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice (under review with UCL Press) with hakan sandal-wilson (LSE) and Abeyamí Ortega (Manchester). She is also writing her second monograph, provisionally titled The Ecstasy of Influence: Queer Appropriation in Ibero-American Literature. She is exploring creative/experimental critical writing in her research and teaching, influenced by writers such as Cristina Rivera Garza, Saidiya Hartman, Claudia Rankine, and Gloria Anzaldúa. 

Supervision

Natasha welcomes research students interested in many areas of modern/contemporary literature, especially topics related to queerness, queer feminisms, migration, racialisation/racism, and decolonial theory and practice. 

Teaching

Undergraduate

Natasha convenes and teaches the World Literature Module ‘Modern Latin American Literature’ and the Advanced Option Module ‘Borders, Bodies, Bridges: Migration and Racialisation in Modern Literature and Culture’. She also lectures/teaches on ‘Reading Now’, ‘Theory Now’ and ‘A World of Literature II: Empire and Aftermaths’.

Postgraduate

Natasha is convenor of the MA in Global Literature and Culture and its core module ‘Debating Global Literary Culture’. She convenes and teaches the MA option module ‘Queer Encounters in Global Literatures and Cultures’. 

External activities

Overview

Natasha is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.