Moira Fradinger

Moira Fradinger is Professor of Comparative Literature and has a Secondary Appointment in Spanish and Portuguese. She grew up in four 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 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 translated anthology of Latin American vernacular Antígona plays (from Haiti, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Brazil) is forthcoming as: Latin American AntígonaS: An Anthology of Seven Translated Plays (Oxford University Press, 2026). She has also translated poems and short stories from Spanish into English and has written academic articles on Latin American and European film and literature, and on the reception of classical tragedy in Latin America.

Her current book projects are on Sleep and Insomnia, contemporary Argentine gender debates, Latin American Third Cinema, and on contemporary psychoanalysis. She is also currently co-editing a volume in honor of filmmaker Margot Benacerraf. 

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 William Sledge, Yale hospital’s Psychiatry Unit, and on Blood: Society, Culture and Science (co-taught with Claudia Valeggia, Yale’s Anthropology Department).

She is affiliated with the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Film and Media Studies Program, 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

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