Overview
Romina Wainberg is a Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Department of Romance Studies and will be starting a tenure-track appointment in Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the University of Southern California in 2025. She holds a Spec. in Creative Writing from Casa de Letras, a B.A. in Literary Theory and Modern Literature from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, an M.Phil in Hispanic Studies from the University of Glasgow, and a Ph.D. in Iberian and Latin American Cultures from Stanford University. Her research addresses the still unresolved question of what “writing” is. In her first book project, she argues that nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Latin American novelists posited innovative theories of writing in their fiction, debunking the myth of the author as an “inspired genius” and reconceiving the act of penning as a mediated, embodied, effortful, and ecological activity. Her follow-up research explores how South American science fiction and Queer art imagine writing technologies of the future.
More broadly speaking... Romina is interested in Latin American aesthetics' potential for expanding the onto-epistemological breadth of other fields of knowledge; some of the intersections that she has explored so far include: media theory, philosophy of technology, and science fiction; motion graphics and aesthetic computing; plastic art and philosophy of art; postmodern novels and theories of individuation; Amerindian thought, contemporary metaphysics, and short fiction; feminist philosophy and perspectival anthropology; poetry, gender identity laws, and LGBTQ+ approaches to the gender/sex dyad. She has also worked on the relationship between extractivism and aesthetics in Portugal and Brazil—in particular, she has examined the tension between gemstones’ chemical composition, their historical aestheticization, and the forced and exploitative labor inherent in their geological extraction.
Publications
2023 -2024
BOOKS
Queer Latin American Voices. Weston: Katakana Editores. Co-edited with Alberto Quintero. 2024.
Sujetos del latinoamericanismo. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Co-edited with Héctor Hoyos and Florencia Garramuño, 2023.
SPECIAL ISSUES
Iphigenia: Centenario, Nuevo Texto Crítico, Vol. 30. Co-edited with Héctor Hoyos and Álvaro Contreras. Forthcoming 2025.
ARTICLES
"Ways of Queerness: Two Cursory Readings of Robin Myers’s Hunting and Gathering," Acta Philologica Volume 62, 2024, 51-73.
TALKS & CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
"Against Productivity: Unproductive Writing in Early Latin American Fiction," Cornell University. Forthcoming.
"Beyond Imagination’s Bounds: A Venezuelan Feminist Expansion of English Romantic Conceptions of ‘Writing’ and ‘the Writer’," Harvard University, December 2024.
"Seasick Metabolism as Style in Gabriel Catren’s Pleromatica, or Elsinore’s Trance," Université de Toulouse, September 2024.
"Casarse o escribirse: escritura improductiva v. reproducción socioeconómica en Ifigenia (1924) de Teresa de la Parra," Stanford University, April 2024.
LITERARY PUBLICATIONS
La enfermedad séxtuple. Festina Publicaciones, 2024.
La larga paciencia. Slimbook, 2024.