Nydia Pineda

Nydia studied French Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). Her undergraduate dissertation was entitled "From the Print to the Pen: Censorship in L'Autre Monde ou Les États et Empires de la Lune" and was awarded Honorific Mention in a viva voce examination. While completing her BA, she participated in a lexical analysis of Homeric Greek for a new translation of the Odyssey into Spanish, and also worked as a copywriter for the Centre of Poetics at the Institute of Philological Investigations at UNAM. From 2007-2009, she was a fellow of the Foundation for Mexican Letters and during this period she wrote a collection of essays examining the idea of moon travel as an image of exile and memory in literature, music and cinema. Her work has been published in Mexican national periodicals. Nydia then went to work in publishing and teaching French as a foreign language. Funded by the Mexican Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT), she came to CELL in 2011 to study the MRes in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Having been awarded a Queen Mary Principle's Research Studentship, she is currently studying a PhD in Queen Mary, University of London. She investigates the idea of lunar journeys in the seventeenth century, primarily focusing on the work of John Wilkins.