Isabel BuyersUndergraduate Humanities Honors Fellow

Isabel Buyers is a senior studying Neuroscience & Behavioral Biology and Spanish.

Her research explores how dementia is represented in Latin American literature and film, with a focus on how it shapes the way life stories are told, remembered, or forgotten. She examines how memory loss affects both personal identity and collective historical memory, especially in societies marked by political violence or generational trauma. Drawing on works from Chile and Argentina, her project investigates how narratives of illness reflect broader questions about storytelling, caregiving, and cultural preservation. She is particularly interested in how authors and filmmakers portray the intimate burden of preserving another person’s memories when they can no longer do so themselves. Through the Life/Story theme, Isabel hopes to better understand the relationship between memory and identity, and how stories can help make sense of what illness erases.