SARA VILLAMARÍN FREIRE

Sara Villamarín Freire is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Santiago de Compostela, affiliated with the Department of English and German Philology under the Faculty of Philology. Her research focuses on contemporary US literature, with a particular emphasis on fatherhood representations, waste studies, and environmental narratives. She holds a PhD from the University of A Coruña (2022), supervised by Dr. José Liste Noya, for her thesis Against the Dominant Fiction: Seeking Alternatives to Hegemonic Fatherhood in Contemporary US Literature.

Her work explores interdisciplinary themes such as slow violence in Appalachian coalfields, the intersection of waste theory and capitalism, and the subversion of patriarchal norms in literary forms. She is part of the research group DI-1924 (Discourse and Identity), funded by projects like “Literature and Globalization 2: Communities of Waste” (PID2019-106798GBI00).

Key research interests include:

• Fatherhood and masculinity in contemporary narratives
• Ecocritical approaches to environmental destruction
• Visual-textual strategies in graphic memoirs
• Waste as a socio-political category

Her publications analyze texts by Cormac McCarthy, Alison Bechdel, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and others, highlighting themes of ethical responsibility, cultural identity, and systemic oppression.