Carolina Viera, an associate professor in the Department of World Languages and lead faculty of Project Scientia, recently represented Boise State at the XXXVIII Congreso Internacional de Literatura y Estudios Hispánicos held in Montevideo, Uruguay, in March 2025.
Viera presented her paper, “Montevideo y Buenos Aires: ¿iguales y hermanas?,” which examines how popular song lyrics contribute to the construction of urban identity in the sister cities of Montevideo and Buenos Aires. Although both cities share many aspects of Río de la Plata culture and similar geographical positions, Viera’s research reveals important distinctions in how each city is discursively represented in popular songs.
Viera’s analysis draws from a corpus of 160 songs that describe these cities and the daily lives of their inhabitants, and uses an automated quantitative discourse analysis (including frequency, keyword analysis and collocations) within the Corpus Analysis framework.