Alicia Zamboni is a doctoral student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University and is pursuing a graduate certificate in Comparative Literature & Society from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS). Her research focuses on the literature of human rights, memory and trauma and specializes in contemporary Hispanic and Francophone migrant literatures. In particular, her interests focus on the symbolic reparations accomplished through narrative, examining how it can act as a powerful instrument to negotiate social and personal trauma.
Alicia holds a Master’s degree and a Bachelor’s degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures from the University of Milan. Her master’s thesis investigated the concept of the mondo-frontiera (world-border) through contemporary Mediterranean and Central American migratory prose, examining how state migration controls create layered boundaries that interrupt human trajectories; her work demonstrated how these narratives serve to document human rights violations and reconstruct fractured communities through the act of writing. For her undergraduate research, she explored post-dictatorship memory practices in Argentina within the context of the H.I.J.O.S. collective, analyzing literary and photographic works by two daughters of the desaparecidos. This project investigated how the affective gesture functions as a powerful remnant of absence, restoring body, voice, agency, and emotional presence to individuals erased by state violence. During her studies, she was awarded two Erasmus scholarships to expand her research at the University of Seville and the University of Poitiers.
Beyond her academic research, Alicia served as an intern for United Nations Trade & Development in Geneva and has worked as a high school teacher of Spanish language and literature in Milan.
