Overview
Sijia Liu is a Ph.D. student in Romance Studies at Cornell University, specializing in modern and contemporary Spanish literature and culture. She received her B.A. in Spanish from Peking University.
Her research examines how landscapes become repositories of historical experience. Approaching landscape as a form of archive, she is interested in the ways material environments register processes of modernization, migration, depopulation, and infrastructural transformation, even as their histories are erased, submerged, or rendered difficult to perceive. Her work asks how literature, photography, and film recover and reinterpret these traces, and how altered landscapes—ruins, abandoned settlements, displaced communities, and transformed territories—shape narratives of memory, loss, and belonging.
More broadly, her interests lie at the intersection of memory studies, spatial theory, visual culture, and modern Spanish cultural history, with particular attention to the relationship between material space and cultural remembrance.