Mabel Moraña (born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on February 20, 1948) is a renowned intellectual and academic who has worked internationally in the fields of literary and cultural criticism in Latin America, being the author of numerous interdisciplinary publications that articulate perspectives on Philosophy, Anthropology, History, and Cultural Theory. Currently she is the William H. Gass Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, Missouri). She is also the Director of the Latin American Studies Program at the same institution. Her research work spans from the Colonial Period, particularly focusing on the Baroque, to the present. Her main contributions are in the areas of the study of national cultures, modernity, postcolonialism, and the history of ideas. Moraña has published articles and books on Andean cultures, Mexican literature and culture, as well as transnational issues. She has contributed to the critical development of categories such as the monstrous, migration, violence, issues related to gender, race and ethnicity, critiques of modernity, postcolonial theory, among other topics.
Her book Arguedas/Vargas Llosa. Dilemas y ensamblajes (Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2013) won an award by the Modern Language Association (MLA). The English translation by Andrew Ascherl, Arguedas/Vargas Llosa. Dilemmas and Assemblages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) was also awarded by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA).
Professional life
Research
Her critical work has been developing since the late 1970s, after leaving her home country, Uruguay, due to the dictatorship of 1973 to 1985. She settled for a few years in Venezuela, where Moraña became part of the famous team of international Latin American scholars at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, including distinguished intellectual figures such as Nelson Osorio, Beatriz González Stephan, Domingo Miliani, Carlos Rincón, Hugo Achugar, Mario Sambarino and many others. There she established her first interactions with Antonio Cornejo Polar, Tomás Eloy Martínez, Jean Franco, Heloísa Buarque de Hollanda, and Ángel Rama.
Continuing her humanistic training, which had culminated in Uruguay with degrees in Literature and Philosophy awarded by the Instituto de Profesores Artigas, she studied for a Master's degree in Philosophy at the Universidad Andrés Bello, in Caracas, Venezuela, working particularly with Arturo Ardao and other important academics from various countries. Afterwards, she migrated to the United States to pursue her Doctoral degree in Literature, at the University of Minnesota, under the direction of Hernán Vidal, which strengthen her orientation towards the studies of ideology, Marxism, and socio-historical approaches. During those years, Moraña worked intensively on Uruguayan culture under the dictatorship, particularly on issues of censorship and self-censorship, cultures of exile and historical memory.
Since the 1990s, Mabel Moraña's critical perspective became closely associated with the studies of Jesús Martin Barbero, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Nelly Richard, Ángel Rama and other representatives of Latin American Cultural Studies, with whom she has maintained close intellectual ties for many decades. Her critical work has been published by prestigious publishing houses, universities and private companies in the United States, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, France, among others, and her articles have appeared in numerous specialized magazines.
Teaching
She was Professor of Latin American Studies at various universities, such as University of Washington (Seattle, Washington), the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, California), the University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) and, currently, in Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, Missouri). She was a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, California), Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), and Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia), Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay), Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (Quito, Ecuador), and several German universities.