Overview
Isabel Calderón is a Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her research engages with memory studies, childhood studies, postcolonial theory, and critical geography to show how children not only unsettle adult-centered scales but also generate new ones.
She holds a BA degree in Communication awarded by Universidad Javeriana, Colombia, and an MFA degree in Creative Writing in Spanish awarded by New York University, for which she was funded with a full scholarship by the NYU Graduate Science and Arts School.
Beyond her academic work, she has experience in literary and cultural initiatives, including projects on reading and childhood at institutions such as the Colombian Book Chamber, the Reading, Technology and Culture Lab at New York University, and Espantapájaros in Bogotá, a renowned project devoted to children’s literature and artistic expression from early childhood.
Research Focus
Isabel’s dissertation argues that errant children function as a disorienting force in 21st-century Latin American fiction and film, disrupting relational dynamics and resizing national narratives. Within her corpus, children are not passive figures observing something larger than themselves, but rather active participants who challenge the very scale of those narratives.
The analytical lens she proposes is the figure of the errant child, informed by authors such as Andrea Jeftanovic, who posits children as the quintessential site of Deleuzian becoming (Hablan los hijos, 2011), and Édouard Glissant, who defines errantry as a state characterized by openness and unpredictability (Poetics of Relation, 2010). In this project, errancy is twofold: children wander aimlessly, lacking a defined destination, but rather than being described as “wandering children,” they are termed errant. This designation resonates with the Spanish adjective errante, which not only refers to moving without a fixed abode but also connotes que yerra—to miss, to err, or to fail. Calderón conceptualizes the errant child as one not only in motion but also navigating through missteps and detours.
Cinema and literature grant attention to characters, making their lives appear larger than their contexts. The proximity of the camera, the time spent observing, and the narrative focus often create a sense of disproportion or elevate certain aspects to centrality. Building on this premise, Isabel’s research shows how the presence of children alters the scale of ‘larger’ stories that shape the concept of nationhood, such as natural disasters, authoritarian regimes, armed conflict, and efforts toward reconciliation. Much like zooming in on a map, where specific details come into sharper focus while broader contexts recede, the errant child illuminates emotional dimensions frequently neglected in national narratives. By centering on this figure, we are prompted to acknowledge that our vantage point never encompasses the entirety of broader events. This intentional receding diminishes awareness of the “big picture,” but productively so, since rescaling challenges the assumption that national memory can be fully understood without attending to the lived experiences that give it substance.
Courses taught:
SPAN 2150: Contemporary Latin American Survey
SPAN 2095: Spanish Intermediate Composition and Conversation II
SPAN 2090: Intermediate Spanish I
SPAN 1230: Continuing Spanish