Celia Rothenberg is an incoming PhD student interested in the study of racial and gender inequality in the Hispanophone world. For her master’s thesis she analyzed the patriarchal society in contemporary Equatorial Guinea through the novels of two female writers. In her thesis, she demonstrates how the position of women in the current postcolonial society has significantly deteriorated compared to their position sixty years earlier—a time before the country’s emancipation from Spain.
During her doctoral studies, she intends to broaden her research of Afro-Hispanic women to include the experiences of women of African descent in the Americas and on the Iberian Peninsula. Through their cultural production, she plans to analyze the characteristics of the diverse patriarchal societies in which these women live, the ways in which these societies influence and shape their lives, and the manner in which their lives differ across regions within the Hispanophone world. In order to conduct this analysis, she intends to draw from many disciplines and theoretical frameworks, including history, anthropology, and postcolonial, gender, transatlantic and Afro-Diaspora studies.