Lourdes Contreras’ academic interest encompass the themes of exile, displacement, temporality, rootedness and ecological representations in literature. Her interest in displacement and rootedness stem from the presence of the root metaphor in Italian literature from the fifteenth century to the contemporary period and the implications that this metaphor has on broader political and theoretical issues. Her research in these subjects investigates connections in both Ecocriticism, Mediterranean Studies, and Ecofeminism through authors such as Fausta Cialente, Grazia Deledda, Gianna Manzini, and Alba de Céspedes, among others. She is interested in the theme of rootedness and its significance in contemporary women-written novels. 

Before beginning at Penn, Lourdes obtained her Bachelor's degree, summa cum laude, at DePaul University (2020), double majoring in Italian and Political Science. During her undergraduate studies, she focused on Italian women writers of the 16th century and the gendered and political underpinnings of Italy’s gastronomic history.  In Chicago she worked at the Italian Trade Agency where she assisted in updating state profiles and revitalizing the Italbooks website and social media. During her undergraduate years she worked as an Italian tutor at DePaul’s Tutoring and Language Learning Center and as a teacher at Insieme a Chicago, an elementary language learning program in Chicago’s West Loop neighborhood. She holds a MA in Italian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and has received the certificate in Global Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She is currently pursuing the CTL Teaching Certificate. Lourdes is a Price Lab Andrew W. Mellon Mid-doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities (2023-2024). She is also a Fontaine Society Fellow and is working on creating a repository of equitable and diverse texts, films, and content for Italian language courses at Penn. She is currently a co-editor for the Bibliotheca Dantesca journal.

She participated in the Newberry Library Italian Paleography Institute in the summer of 2022 and will participate in Price Lab's upcoming 2023 Dream Lab summer school and Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.

Although contemporary literature remains her primary field of study, the digital humanities, visual arts and oral history are among her areas of interest.