Navigating illness, identity, and humanity through scholarly research
Dr. Margarita Saona’s transformative experience in the healthcare system inspired a commitment to cultural enrichment at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Interview with Margarita Saona
Name: Margarita Saona
Title: Professor
Department: Hispanic and Italian Studies
How did you become interested in the field of Latin American Literature?
I was a voracious reader in my childhood, I loved languages, and I dreamed of becoming a writer. For my undergraduate degree I studied linguistics and literature in Lima, Peru, my hometown and then I came to the States for my Ph.D. My love of literature acquired a scholarly perspective once it became my subject of study in college and beyond, but I also kept writing fiction and poetry on the margins of my academic focus.
Tell us a bit about your history at UIC. What has been your favorite accomplishment in your time here?
I came to UIC twenty-seven years ago, right after completing my Ph.D. I was attracted by the idea of a public research university in a major, diverse, city, and I was not disappointed. I love UIC students and their simultaneous commitment to learning and to their communities. I have received tremendous support for my research at UIC. This has allowed me to grow as a scholar and tackle a variety of issues in my publications, from national identity in Latin American novels, to art and memory after social and political trauma. However, my favorite accomplishment is what my department has done collectively in supporting Latine students claim their linguistic rights as heritage language of Spanish. Originally designed by Prof. Kim Potowsky, the Spanish Heritage Language program has succeeded thanks to the work of many people, from teaching assistants and lecturers to administrators. This semester I am teaching a creative writing class for heritage speakers and both my students and I are tremendously enriched by the experience.
Your book, Corazón en trance, shares your heart transplant story. Can you talk about how this experience helped shape your scholarship and writing?
I had just published my book Memory Matters in Transitional Peru when I suffered my first cardiac event. In that book I had already explored issues of cognition and embodiment, like the illusion that we remember something that we have not experienced first-hand. I was curious about how what we perceive with our senses can impact our mind. The extreme experiences of heart disease, surgeries, transplantation, and immunosuppression impacted, from the very beginning, my sense of self and I started by writing poetry and keeping a blog. As the years went by, and thanks to the support of the UIC Institute for the Humanities, I was able to investigate the ways patients and health providers write about experiences like mine, while at the same time I reconstructed the story of my illness, interspersing it with reflections about disease, healthcare, and our humanity.
Describe some of your ongoing research as a faculty member at UIC. Do you have any exciting initiatives on the horizon?
I am currently working on two projects. I am co-editing a book on cyborg subjectivity, which will collect pieces on the sense of self of cyborgs in fiction and non-fiction from a variety of perspectives, including posthumanism, ecocriticism, crip theory, and life writing. I am also starting to research recent Peruvian poetry that explores illness not at the individual level, but in its connections to climate change, political violence, and extractivist politics.
Has anything surprised you in your research?
Perhaps something I would not have expected when I first majored in Literature in college is that I would end up reading articles on neuroscience and on phenomenology to analyze literary texts. But I think that our research should always surprise us. Ideally, even if we have hypotheses, we should approach the search of knowledge without expecting a specific outcome, and would, therefore, be surprised by our findings.
What do you hope students will gain from learning about the field of Hispanic and Italian Studies? How do you prepare students for their future careers?
The study of languages and cultures opens up a different understanding of the world. At a moment when there are people wanting to make English the official language of the United States, we need to recognize that we live in a multilingual society that is connecting to many other societies around the world. If we want to interact with the world and create social and working relationships with others, we need to develop our own skills to understand the diverse, complex nature of human society. Italian and Spanish are two ways of making connections beyond the anglophone universe. In certain cases, having studied a language other than the dominant language of instruction in your society, will help you directly in future careers: you could, for example, work with Italian businesses with offices in the United States, or become an editor or translator for a Spanish publishing house, or a high school teacher of the language you major in. But even if you do not use the language directly, being proficient in more than one language develops an understanding of the world and of human nature that goes beyond the monolingual experience.
Do you have any advice for new students coming to UIC?
Always ask for help. If there are any obstacles for you to do what classes expect from you, talk to your instructor. We all want you to succeed. We can either offer direct support or point you in the right direction. There is no merit in pretending to be self-sufficient. We are in this together.
Any additional details you’d like to add?
I hope that UIC continues to be the space of inquiry and growth I have known for the past 27 years.