Moira Fradinger

Biography

Moira Fradinger is a Professor of Comparative Literature. She grew up in four different South American countries, is a native speaker of Spanish, and fully 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, and teaching in the Department of Psychology at the University of Buenos Aires. She was also a professional staff member in the National Ministry of Health and Social Action at the Under-Secretary for Women’s Affairs, through which she obtained a Dutch fellowship to pursue an MA in “Women and Development” 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), winner of the 2024 René Wellek Award for best monograph, granted by the American Comparative Literature Association. Her book-length translation project is forthcoming: Latin American AntígonaS: An Anthology of Seven Translated Plays, consisting of 20th century Latin American vernacular Antígona plays from Haiti, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil, that she translated into English. She has also translated poems and short stories from Spanish into English. She has written articles on Latin American film and literature, and on the reception of classical tragedy in Latin America.

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

She has been awarded the Dahlem International Network Professorship for Gender Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she taught in the Summer 2018, and has received a Berlin Prize, spending a semester as a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany in 2020.

She has won several teaching awards; the latest were the 2025 Graduate School’s Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities, and the 2012 Sarai Ribicoff Award for the Encouragement of Teaching at the Yale College. She has taught courses on topics such as Introduction to Narrative, European and Latin American film and literature, Latin American Third Cinema and Contemporary Film; Latin American and Caribbean Anti-Colonial Thought (19th and 20th centuries); Critical Cultural Theory; Psychoanalytic theories of the subject; Differences Between the Freudian and the Lacanian traditions; Gender theories; and Medical Humanities, with seminars such as Critical Sleep Studies; cross-divisional ones on Freud and Neuroscience (co-taught with Yale hospital’s Psychiatry Unit, and on Blood: Society, Culture and Science (co-taught with Yale’s Anthropology Department).

She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Multidisciplinary Academic Program in Human Rights, the Film and Media Studies Program, the Spanish and Portuguese Department, and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Council. At the Macmillan Center she served as 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).

Education

Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University, United States

MA in Women and Development (ISS: Institute for Social Studies), thesis in feminist epistemology, The Hague, The Netherlands

Licenciatura in Psychology (UBA), specialization in Psychoanalysis and treatment of psychosis, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Research Interests

South American, Caribbean and European fiction and film; Latin American and European Anti-colonial and decolonial thought; theories of democracy and Ancient Greek tragedy and democracy; reception of Greek tragedy in Latin America; the French revolutionary imagination; the Global South; Southern European cultural exchange with South America; critical theory; feminist theory; 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, critical sleep studies.

Publication Highlights

 -AntígonaS: A Translated Anthology of Seven Latin American Plays (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)

- Margot Benacerraf: An Inexhaustible Passion for Cinema (co-edited, in progress and under advanced contract)

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

-Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford UP, 2010)

–“De italianos en Buenos Aires: El Pañuelo de Clarita (1919) de Emilia Saleny” in Vivomatografías 10, 2024.

– “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)

-“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); modified version 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 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

Insomnia

Third Cinema

Jacques Lacan and Contemporary Subjectivity

Argentina’s Legal Gender Debates