Healing Terror With Arts: Erika Almenara Awarded School of Art Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship

Erika Almenara, director of the Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Program, was recently named as one of the two recipients of the School of Art Interdisciplinary Faculty Fellowship to conduct research in Peru.

Almenara will spend four weeks in Lima, Peru, exploring the healing and transformative power of the arts as well as the creative and artistic resources offered to incarcerated women who were members of Shining Path, a far left communist party of Peru. Founded in 1970, Shining Path was officially categorized as a terrorist group by the United States in 1977.

Almenara will explore the cultural archives of the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social (Memory, Tolerance, and Social Inclusion Place), looking at various material on how the internal armed conflict targeted and affected female members of Shining Path,  particularly Quechua-speaking peasant women.

"I am particularly interested in studying the center's collection of conflict propaganda in the Center of Documentation and Investigation to follow the narratives that Shining Path developed through artistic works such as poems, performances, and short stories to empower women in the party, as well as to exploit their mental and emotional wounds and needs with the goal of enrolling them in the party," she said.

Additionally, she will meet with scholars, writers, and  members of the NGO Manuela Ramos, looking at gender violence during and after the internal armed conflict. To gain a deeper understanding Almenara believes "it is essential to combine theoretical knowledge with real-world application" As such, she will simultaneously be offering a creative writing workshop to a group of twenty incarcerated female members of Shining Path.

Almenara has held three similar workshops with other incarcerated Peruvians. In 2023 she led poetry workshops at two female jails and in 2025 she held a creative writing workshop for incarcerated men.

"All seventeen men have continued writing and drawing and have adapted their written works into short performative pieces," evidence of the lasting impact of the creative process. Building off of these successes, she plans to add an element of sustainability to this workshop, mentoring her top three students so they can conduct workshops independently.

The results of Almenara's research will be included in her new monograph Literary and Cultural Representations of Social Gender Perception in Post-Conflict Peru, and integrated into her courses at the university.

"For instance, my current students in the Creative Writing in Spanish class are working (anonymously) on poems written by inmates at the Miguel Castro Castro Peruvian prison," Almenara said. "They are learning about Peruvian history and politics, but also understanding, in a deeper way, some of the traumas these men faced that led them to delinquency." 

For Almenara, her research does more than simply highlight the interdisciplinary nature of CLCS scholarship. "These experiences provided a brief opportunity to see the healing power of the creative process to enhance well-being."