I am Ph.D. student in the Spanish program at the University of Notre Dame, honored to be the recipient of a Notre Dame Presidential Fellowship. After the completion of my B.A. in Anthropology, I worked as a teaching assistant at the University of the Republic, and I gained research experience as well as financial support to pursue my graduate studies from Uruguay’s National Agency of Research and Innovation (2013-2015) and the Graduate Academic Committee at the University of the Republic (2015-2016).
I participated in many academic work groups addressing my research interest, among those worth mentioning the Red Foucault Latinoamerica. My current research approaches the female gothic in Hispanic American literature. In my dissertation, I mainly focus on the tropes of the automaton woman/doll and witches. Revitalizing the uncanny and the sublime for the study of representation of women in gothic fiction, I revisit the Freudian analysis of the automaton woman in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” claiming that the potential of this doppelgänger has been overlooked in the study of female gothic.
After identifying the uncanny features of machinery and femininity, I continue to work on the features that made distinguishable the reversion of this trope in Hispanic American literature with dolls and witchcraft. My reading of canonical stories such as “Aura” y “La muñeca reina” by Carlos Fuentes, “La muñeca menor” by Rosario Ferré, “La condesa sangrienta” by Alejandra Pizarnik and “Las Hortensias” by Felisberto Hernández explains the symbolism of the (un)dead doppelgänger and the power of sexual femininity over masculinity to evoke the uncanny in modern era.