Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies launches Digital Fellowship to support early career researchers
The Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) has launched a new Digital Fellowship aimed at supporting early career researchers working in the field of gender studies.
Victoria Macioci, an art historian and researcher from Argentina, has been selected as the inaugural fellow. Through the fellowship, Victoria will further develop her research at the intersection of trans studies, community archives, memory and the history of travesti/trans health.
Victoria completed a PhD in Literary Studies at the National University of La Plata. Her doctoral research, Archivar para resistir. Prácticas trans-archivísticas y memoria travesti en Argentina 2012-2025 (Archiving to Resist: Trans-archival Practices and Travesti Memory in Argentina 2012-2025), examined how travesti/trans communities create and use their own archives to produce historical knowledge and preserve collective memory. Alongside her academic work, Victoria coordinates the archive of the Biblioteca Claudia Pía Baudracco, a community-led travesti/trans archive in Buenos Aires Province.
Since 2022, Victoria has worked closely with older travesti survivors through archival research, oral history and collaborative memory projects. Through this work, questions about health, bodily transformation and ageing have become increasingly central to her research.
One area of particular interest is the use of injected liquid silicone, which became an important technology of gender affirmation for many travesti/trans people in contexts where regulated gender-affirming healthcare was either unavailable or discriminatory.
Following this announcement, we spoke to Victoria about her plans for the fellowship, what the opportunity means to her, and the research questions she hopes to explore during her time with CIGS.
What will you be doing whilst on your fellowship?
During the CIGS Digital Fellowship, I will develop Living Body Archives. Travesti-Trans Health, Silicone and Technologies of Care, a project examining the long-term health histories associated with injected liquid silicone among ageing travesti/trans people in Argentina and Brazil.
The project asks what people have come to know about their own bodies after living with silicone for many years, how this knowledge circulated within travesti/trans communities, and what becomes visible when embodied experience is analysed alongside oral histories and community archives.
The fellowship builds on my ongoing collaboration with Dr Patricio Simonetto. We previously worked together on the University of Leeds project Trans Archives for Trans Health: Co-producing Advocacy Content with Community Archiving, and I am currently a co-investigator with him on the Society for Latin American Studies Research Development Award project Trans/Travesti Community Archiving and Material Culture in Argentina.
During the fellowship, I will undertake an interdisciplinary review of research on liquid silicone, trans health, ageing, embodied knowledge and community archives. Working with Dr Simonetto, I will develop the conceptual and methodological framework for Living Body Archives, work towards a co-authored publication and present the emerging project to the CIGS community.
What does this fellowship mean for you?
Being selected for the CIGS Digital Fellowship gives me the opportunity to consolidate a research direction that has emerged from several years of collaborative work with travesti/trans communities in Argentina. It also allows me to place my humanities and archival background in sustained dialogue with research on health, medicine and ageing. CIGS provides an interdisciplinary environment in which I can develop this transition while continuing to work closely with Dr Simonetto, whose research on gender, sexuality and the history of medicine in Latin America is highly complementary to my own.
We hope Victoria to be the first of many future CIGS digital fellows. This is an initiative we co-developed with the co-director of CIGS, Megan Robertson, to support the internationalisation of our research centre and support young early-career researchers who want to gain research experience in the UK. The project that Victoria is working on has enormous potential, and I hope to support her in developing a successful grant application to develop this very necessary research.
The School of Sociology and Social Policy congratulates Victoria on being awarded this digital fellowship, and thanks her for sharing insights with the School community.
