Catalina Iannone

Catalina Iannone is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She completed her Bachelor's and Master's in Spanish Language and Literature at New York University and New York University in Madrid, respectively. Her current research is focused on 20th and 21st century cultural production on the Iberian Peninsula. Her dissertation explores the gentrification of two ethnically diverse neighborhoods in European capital cities, places where migration has produced diasporic geographies of the Global South: Lavapiés in Madrid and the Mouraria in Lisbon. She hypothesizes that the way rhetorical tropes visibly manifest through concrete cultural production guides policy, practice, and the negotiation of space in these two neighborhoods. Thus, by better understanding how these rhetorical practices arise and are perpetuated, it becomes possible to denounce how cultural production contributes to violent exclusion. Ms. Iannone is also interested in questions of immigrant rights in the United States, and she volunteers weekly at Austin's Casa Marianella, an emergency shelter in Austin for adult immigrants and refugees.