Hernán FeldmanAssociate Professor of SpanishDirector of the Honors Program

Hernán Feldman is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University. He trained and practiced as a lawyer in Buenos Aires, earning his law degree at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, before turning to literature. He holds an MA and a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature, with a minor in Cultural Studies, from Indiana University. His work pursues a question that began in the law and followed him into literature and film: how does a community decide who belongs, and what becomes of those it keeps out?

 

His first book, Una patria amurallada: políticas de contención en la Argentina aluvial (1870–1904) (Prometeo, 2011), studies how Argentina’s elites sought to contain the social changes brought by mass immigration. His essays on Argentine and Latin American literature, film, law and political thought have appeared in MLN, Revista Iberoamericana, Hispamérica and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, among other journals.

 

His research later turned to Queer, Travesti and Trans studies, which now stand at the center of his scholarship and teaching. He writes on Camila Sosa Villada’s fiction alongside Travesti theory from the South, and on how parents and chosen kin come to know again Trans young people after they come out. This is the subject of his book in progress, Trans-Formative Discoveries: Cinema, Kinship, and Belonging in Buenos Aires and Rome. He is also writing Entre la esquina y la pantalla, a study of the representation of sex workers in Luso-Hispanic literature and film.

 

At Emory he teaches Latin American political essay, literature, film and visual culture writ-large. From 2008 to 2018 he directed the university’s summer program in Buenos Aires. He often teaches language courses over the summer.