School of HASS Research Seminar

Speakers

Celina Bortolotto is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in Spanish at UNE, and Senior Lecturer at Massey University, NZ.

Leonel Alvarado is Adjunct Associate Professor in Spanish at UNE and Professor at Massey University, NZ

Celina Bortolotto, "Choreographing Womanhood: Celebrity, Authenticity, and Southern Postfeminism in Leanne Morgan's Comedy"

"When you write to me on social media and say 'I'm living your life,' I know it's true." This presentation examines how the American comedian Leanne Morgan constructs a commercially successful persona by transforming the contradictions of contemporary Southern womanhood into a shared emotional rhythm. Through close textual analysis of her memoir What in the World (2024) and her stand-up performances, I argue that Morgan performs what I term a Southern postfeminist square dance rhetoric: a patterned movement in which she steps toward feminist critique before pivoting back into the reassuring cadence of tradition, faith, and domestic femininity. This rhetorical strategy aligns with the construction of Morgan's celebrity persona, showing how her confessional, maternal, and self-deprecating authenticity functions simultaneously as emotional intimacy and as a form of brand coherence across platforms. In doing so, her work exemplifies how contemporary celebrity comedians mobilize authenticity as both a cultural and commercial strategy.

Leonel Alvarado, "From England to Honduras via Australia: A Lady's Ride Across Spanish Honduras"

In 1884 Mary Lester published an account of her arduous trip to Honduras. She had worked as a governess to a planter in Fiji and was currently living and working in Sydney when she received an offer to run a school for the children of European and US immigrants in Honduras. She was offered both employment and land for her own farm – Latin American countries were employing this tactic to entice European immigrants, as did Australia. Her compelling book exposes a scheme that had devastating personal, social, and political consequences. This talk will contextualize her journey within the field of women's travel writing, which became extremely popular in the 19th century, and Positivism, which influenced both economic and social policies as post-independence Latin America was undergoing a process of nation-building and modernization.

For Zoom link contact: Sandy Boucher, aboucher@une.edu.au