Marcelo Morales was born in La Paz, Bolivia and moved to the United States in 2009. He is currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Spanish at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. He attended the University of Virginia where he earned a B.A. in History and Spanish, focusing on Cultures and Literatures in 2021. He also earned a M.A. in European Studies from the University of Virginia in 2022. As a M.A. student, Marcelo produced a master’s thesis titled: “A Woman’s Struggle: The Changing Image of Womanhood on the Republican Side of the Spanish Civil War,” which focused on evaluating how women participated and challenged gender normative standards in the war and how they became sites of ideological contention for both the Republican and Nationalist forces in the first year of Spanish Civil War.
Marcelo’s dissertation examines the transgression of the male-female gender binary in post-revolutionary Mexico and how this construction of the self parallels the state’s own construction of what it meant to be a nation as well as the developing concept of citizenship. In this project he researches the trans/travesti body in Mexico between 1920 and 1990 through an archival analysis of different –but consecutive– historical periods in Mexico’s history. This project examines two emerging identities in Mexico during the first half of the 20th century: mexicanidad and homosexuality. This project assesses how gender-transgressive individuals constructed a sense of identity while simultaneously forming a Mexican identity in the post-revolutionary sociopolitical landscape.
20th century wars and revolutions involving minority populations including but not limited to women, campesinos or people of color. Marcelo is interested in the intersection between gender politics and politics affecting society before, during, and after a major social conflict. He is also interested in how minority populations influence the way a conflict is perceived and how their participation can influence an outcome. Finally, Marcelo is mainly interested in the culture and literature of Spain and Latin America, but is also interested in the greater context and involvement of these two regions with the rest of the world.