Ana Forcinito

Ana Forcinito received her BA from the University of Buenos Aires (Facultad de Filosofia y Letras) and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and cultural studies. Her research focuses on a wide range of topics in literature, testimonio, cultural theory, photography, film studies, and Latin American and Latinx feminist theory, and it can be described through these three interconnected areas:

1) interdisciplinary approaches to Latin American testimonio and literary and visual practices anchored in the promotion of human rights, transitional justice, and the construction of memory in post-authoritarian regimes, and, more recently, the connections between testimonial narratives (and narratives in general) and fields such as the medical humanities and narrative medicine;

2) gender studies and Latin American and Latinx feminist theory and artistic practices (saber-pensar and pensar -hacer-sentir feminista) and the intersection of posthuman feminist and decolonial perspectives in/from/about the Global South, as expressed in literature, film, photography, and performative practices;

3) visual studies in Latin America, with an emphasis on photography and film, women filmmakers in Argentina, and the articulation of audiovisual aesthetics, especially aurality, the voice, and its desynchronization from the image.

She teaches a wide range of courses on 19th, 20th, and 21st century Latin American literature, cinema, and visual studies, as well as interdisciplinary courses on memory, human rights, and gender studies. In 2022, Prof. Forcinito received the University of Minnesota Motley Award for Exemplary Teaching.

Professor Forcinito is the author of Memorias y nomadías: géneros y cuerpos en los márgenes del posfeminismo (2004), Los umbrales del testimonio: entre las narraciones de los sobrevivientes y las marcas de la posdictadura (2012), Oyeme con los ojos: Cine, mujeres, voces, visiones (2018) (translated as Hear Me with Your Eyes: Women, Visions, Voices in Argentine Cinema [2022)], and Intermittences: Memory, Justice, and the Poetics of the Visible (2019). She has edited ten collections of essays about various interdisciplinary topics, including Layers of Memory and the Discourse of Human Rights (2014), and she co-edited Human Rights and Latin American and Iberian Cultures (2009), Poner el cuerpo. Rescatar y visibilizar las marcas sexuales y de género de los archivos dictatoriales (2017), Migraciones, derechos humanos y acciones locales (2020), and Lo decible de la desaparición (2022). In 2018 she received the Casa de las Américas Award for the book Óyeme con los ojos. She was the holder of the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair between 2013 and 2022 and has been the recipient of grants from the American Philosophical Society, the Rockefeller Humanities Programs at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Universidad de la República in Uruguay, the Institute of Advanced Studies, the CLA Collaborative, and the UMN Grant in Aid, among others.

Ana Forcinito is currently working on two book projects. The first is a feminist approach to the transitional justice process in Argentina and examines the numerous debates on gender violence that have been taking place since the transition to democracy until present times, underscoring the crucial impact that literary and artistic practices have had in the process of building capacity about gender-based violence in the cultural realm as well as in the legal and judicial systems. The book focuses on two forms of violence—sexual violence in clandestine detention centers during the last military dictatorship and femicide/travesticide/transfemicide—and the activisms that they generated, from the survivors of state terrorism to the feminist tide of the present. Through a corpus of literary and artistic explorations of violence, vis-à-vis legal and judicial transformations, the book underscores that the legal and judicial systems have been permanently contested and transformed not only by social movements but also by debates that originate in literary texts and artistic productions.

Her second book-project examines written and visual narratives of the body in Latin American and Latinx literature, performance art, and photography in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in dialogue with critical posthumanities and, specifically, with a posthuman feminism desde el Sur. The book examines new directions of memory and archival construction that focus on the aesthetic rethinking of corporeality that, even when taking the injuries and fragility of feminized, otherized, and racialized bodies as a point of departure, explores new becomings and makes visible their fluidity, connectivity, diverse assemblage, and decolonial transformation.

She is the Executive Editor of Hispanic Issues and Hispanic Issues Online and the Cultural Studies editor of Editorial A Contracorriente.