About

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.

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

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), Lo decible de la desaparición (2022) and Generación Hijes: memoria, posdictadura y posconflicto en América Latina (2023).

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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.

She has been very active in designing and participating in the organization of lectures, symposia, and conferences and has organized and co-organized more than ten events that have gathered different groups of renowned scholars, artists, writers, activists, and academics to address interdisciplinary issues of great relevance to the humanities. In addition, in 2017, she organized the exhibit Ausencias by Argentine artist Gustavo Germano, an artistic project about the long-lasting effects of enforced disappearances in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. In 2019, and as co-chair of the Faculty Symposium Committee for the 150th anniversary of the College of Liberal Arts, she contributed to the engineering of a week-long series of interdisciplinary workshops and lectures, “Time Past, Time Present, Time Future.” She also coordinated the digital project Documenting Truth, Trials, and Memory in El Salvador & Guatemala, for use by scholars, human rights defenders, and the general public. Since 2018, she has co-organized lecture series, workshops, and conferences for the collaborative project Memory, Trauma, and Human Rights at the Crossroads of Arts and Sciences.