I am Ph.D. student in the Spanish program at the University of Notre Dame and PhD Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. I am also honored to be the recipient of a Notre Dame Presidential Fellowship.
My research interest is oriented towards the relations between psychoanalysis and poststructuralism, particularly in the work of Michel Foucault. I am interested in the decline of sovereign power, centered on the punishment of the transgressor, and the expansion of disciplinary power, centered on the assimilation of abnormality into our culture. A genealogy of abnormality shows that Modernity can be understood as an epoch where Western culture begins to open as never before to Otherness in terms of external exchange and internal exploration of subjectivity.
My dissertation project addresses the automaton female as a major trope to understand the gothic female in modern Hispanic literature. My research starts with a revision of the beginning of the theorization and interpretation of the automaton female in Hoffmann’s “The Sadman” (1817). I argue that Freud fails to give account about Olympia’s power to arise the uncanny. Highlighting the importance of Doppelgangers, technology, and femininity as sources of uncanniness, I am working on a new literary discourse to comprehend femininity, considering the dimension of the uncanny and the sublime, in “Las Hortensias” by Felisberto Hernández, “Aura” y “La muñeca reina” by Carlos Fuentes, y “La muñeca menor” by Rosario Ferré.
After the completion of my B.A. in Anthropology, I have worked as teaching assistant at the University of the Republic, and I gained research experience as well as financial support from Uruguay’s National Agency of Research and Innovation (2013-2015) and the Graduate Academic Committee at the University of the Republic (2015-2016).