Moira Fradinger

Moira Fradinger's picture
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
(203) 432-8267

Bio

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 psychotic patients in public hospitals. In Argentina 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. She joined Yale first as a graduate student, and was hired in 2005 in Comparative Literature.

She is the author of Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford UP, 2010) and has written articles on Latin American film and literature, and on the reception of classical tragedy in Latin America. Currently she is finishing two projects: a book on 20th century Latin American rewritings of Antigone, with the working title of “Antígonas: A Latin American Tradition,” and an anthology of five Antigone-plays (from Haiti, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru, and Brazil) that she translated into English. She has also translated poems and short stories from Spanish into English.

She has three book-length projects in research phase, including a study of Gender Debates in 21st century Argentina, a study on revolutionary Latin American cinema in the sixties, and one of the anarchist imagination, focusing on anarchist journals and their women writers on both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the 20th century.

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 Radical Films from Latin America; Latin American and Caribbean Intellectual history (19th and 20th centuries); Latin American and World literature; Psychoanalytic theories of the subject; Freud and Science; Lacan and the Post-Freudians; Gender theories and their politics; Introduction to Narrative; Feminist Film makers.

Education History

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

Publication Highlights

“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 (forthcoming)

“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.

“Tragedy shakes hands with Testimony: Uruguay’s Survivors Act in Morena’s and Lösch’s Antígona Oriental” Fall 2014 PMLA Issue on Tragedy, edited by Helene Foley and Jean Howard

“Revisiting Argentine Political Documentaries of the Late 1950s and early 1960s”in Antonio Traverso and Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli edsPolitical Documentary Film and Video in the Southern Cone (1950s-2000s). Special issue, Latin American Perspectives. Vol 40.188. Number 1. January 2013. 

Reprinted in a modified version in Traverso and Crowder-Taraborreli eds Cine Documental Político en el Cono Sur, LOM editores, Santiago de Chile, 2015, and 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.

“Demanding the Political: Widows or Ariel Dorfman’s Antigones” in Special Issue Whose Voice is This?Iberian and Latin American Antigones,Hispanic Issues Online HIOL 13: pp 63-81) Web. Fall 2013

https://yale.academia.edu/MoiraFradinger