Moira Fradinger

Biography

Moira Fradinger is Associate Professor in the department of Comparative Literature. She grew up in four South American countries: Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela. A native speaker of Spanish, she is also proficient in French, Italian and Portuguese. Before her academic life in the USA, she had started her career as a psychologist in Argentina, working in clinical practice with patients living with psychosis in public hospitals. She –participated in the anti-asylum movement and she was also a professional staff member in the National Ministry of Health and Social Action at the Under-Secretary for Women’s Affairs and taught at the University of Buenos Aires. After completing an MA in “Women and Development/ Gender Theory” in The Netherlands she joined Yale first as a graduate student, and then as an Assistant Professor in 2005 in Comparative Literature.

She is the author of Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford UP, 2010) and of Antígonas: Writing From Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has written articles on Latin American film and literature, and on the reception of classical tragedy in Latin America. She has completed the translation project Antígonas Anthology, consisting of six 20th century Latin American vernacular Antígona plays translated into English, from Haiti, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil. She has also translated poems and short stories from Spanish into English.

Her current book projects are on contemporary Argentine gender debates, on Latin American Third Cinema and on Insomnia.

She has been awarded the Dahlem International Network Professorship for Gender Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she taught Gender Theory, and has received a Berlin Prize, spending a semester as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.

She has won several teaching awards; the latest one was the Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching at the Yale College (2012). She has taught courses on topics such as Latin American Third Cinema and Contemporary Film; Latin American and Caribbean Anti-Colonial Thought (19th and 20th centuries); Marxist Cultural Theory; European and Latin American literature; Psychoanalytic theories of the subject; Jacques Lacan and the Post-Freudians; Gender theories and their politics; Introduction to Narrative; Feminist Film makers; and cross-divisional courses such as Freud and Science and Blood: Culture and Science.

She is affiliated with the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Council. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Council of Latin American Studies (CLAIS) and of the Executive Committee of the Latin American Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Network LAIGN (Yale-Unam, Mexico). She is currently curating the monthly webinar series on Gender: “Conversatorios de los viernes” (CLAIS).

Education

Licenciatura in Psychology (UBA), specialization in Psychoanalysis and treatment of psychosis, Buenos Aires, Argentina
MA in Women and Development (ISS: Institute for Social Studies), thesis in feminist epistemology, The Hague, The Netherlands
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University, United States

Research Interests

South American, Caribbean and European fiction and film; Anti-colonial and decolonial thought; the French revolutionary imagination; Southern European cultural exchange with South America; the Global South; Ancient Greek tragedy and democracy; reception of Greek tragedy in Latin America; critical theory; feminist theory; gender politics and global women’s movements; political philosophy, theories of democracy, the anarchist imagination and the history of the left; anthropologies of violence; psychoanalytic theory; film studies; Third Cinema; history of science and narrative medicine.

Publication Highlights

 –Antígonas - Writing from Latin America, Oxford University Press, Published 3/24/2023, ISBN: 9780192897091

– “Humananimal Assemblages: Slaughters in Latin American Left-wing Cinema” in political cinema” in Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. Fornoff and Heffes, Albany: SUNY Press, 2021:111-139

“Medea in Argentina” in the Brill Companion on Euripides, ed. Andreas Markantonatos, Leiden; Boston: Brill, Chapter 48: 1110-1128, 2020

- Entry “Gender Identity in the Southern Cone” (co-written) for Gender and Identity Worldwide, Chuck Stewart ed., Los Angeles: ABC-CLIO Educational Publishing, 2020

–“Cuerpos anfibios: metamorfosis y ectoentidad sexual en XXY (2007) de Lucía Puenzo”. Cuadernos de Literatura 20.40 (2016)

“Making Women Visible: Multiple Antigones on the Colombian twenty-first century stage” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, ed. by Justine McConnell, Oxford Handbooks in Classical and Ancient History, Oxford University Press: 2015: Chapter 32: 556-575

“Huellas de archivo al rescate de una pionera del cine sudamericano: Josefina Emilia Saleny (1894 –1978) in Revue Cinémas d’Amérique latine, N. 22, March 2014 special issue, Cinéma et femmes en Amérique latine (Film and Women in Latin America) (March 2014); a modified version appears in “Emilia Saleny: first woman film-maker in South America” Online project Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (eds Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta)  New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries.

 “Revisiting Argentine Political Documentaries of the Late 1950s and early 1960s”in Antonio Traverso and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli eds,  Political Documentary Film and Video in the Southern Cone (1950s-2000s). Special issue, Latin American Perspectives. Vol 40.188. Number 1. January 2013. Modified versions reprinted in Traverso and Crowder-Taraborreli eds Cine Documental Político en el Cono Sur, LOM editores, Santiago de Chile, 2015, and in Francisco Montaña ed. Cómo se piensa el cine latinoaméricano: aparatos epistemológicos, herramientas, fugas e intentos, Observatorio de historia y teoría del cine latinoamericano, Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2011.

Work in Progress

Argentina’s Gender Laws: Re-Imagining the Human

Third Cinema

Insomnia