Kellogg Institute Faculty Fellow Vanesa Miseres, an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Notre Dame, is telling a few war stories. They’re not the biographies or battle accounts you typically hear from military historians, but rather the cultural and literary voices of Latin American women discussed in Miseres’ new book, Gender Battles: Latin American Women, War, and Feminism (University of Toronto Press, Nov 2025).
“When people approach women and the role of women at war, they’re usually studied as objects and victims,” said Miseres, who will present her work at a December 5 book launch on campus. “They’re the mothers suffering and sending their children to war.”
With her research, Miseres shifts away from passive roles to explore how women were thinking and writing about the war. These accounts are less traditional but capture the perspectives and practical intricacies of how battlefield and homefront are closely interwoven in women’s lives.
“I'm trained in literature but I do a lot of things that are connected to history,” said Miseres. Part of her work, supported by a Kellogg research grant during her Berlin residency under a Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers, involved sifting through archival material for women’s voices in letters, papers, magazine articles, and more.
Some sources, like the Argentine magazine La Nota that addressed women to discuss the lessons of Europe during the Great War, demonstrated the international reach of women’s voices on war, pacifism, and feminism.
“When the world wars started, feminist groups divided in the European context,” Miseres explained. “Some could still support the pacifist movement while others took the nationalist perspective. In Latin America – as wars pushed women outside of the home and they started working in factories – women saw in war a possibility to expand their influence and opportunity to rethink their own roles in local societies .”
Miseres says she can hear the influence of these voices in the present hour, describing an early 2022 experience in Berlin when the start of war in Ukraine was juxtaposed with International Women’s Day events throughout the city.
“It’s more visible today than it was maybe 100 years ago,” she said. “Women's voices are the ones right now telling us that there's no way to hold a conflict without considering the role of women, the patriarchy, and the effect of patriarchy in society,” Miseres said.
She also warns of a backlash in Mexico, Chile, and other Latin America countries against feminist advances, and democratic principles and political reforms.
“Something I have learned – from the research and the previous centuries and generations of women – is that women have always learned to manage and keep fighting, through conversation and dialogue, for what they thought was right at different moments,” Miseres said.
At her upcoming book launch, Miseres will discuss her research with Katherine Marino, associate professor of history at University of California Los Angeles, and Sebastian Diaz-Duhalde, associate professor of Spanish at Dartmouth College.
The launch event is set for 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on December 5 in Decio Hall, in the third-floor Romance Languages Commons area. It is co-sponsored by the Kellogg Institute and the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.