Romina Wainberg

Romina Wainberg is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. Her upcoming book, Against Productivity: Unproductive Writing in Early Latin American Fiction, grapples with a long-standing narrative about so-called “foundational Latin American fictions”—namely that by imagining heterosexual romances between different ethno-racial and socio-economic constituencies, these works seduced readers into literally and symbolically (re)producing citizens of new nation-states. Wainberg argues that, in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Latin America, the same novels that were supposed to engender “productive” citizens through the instructional power of the written letter depicted the very act of writing as an “unproductive” activity: that is, as an act performed against the socioeconomic interests of slavery-based and emerging capitalist societies.

Further, she contends that early novels not only constitutively defied the productivist “foundational fictions” narrative, but also depicted experimental textual practices and developed sophisticated theories of what writing is. In particular, they portrayed penning as an embodied, effortful, and ecological activity. Against the myth of the author as a spontaneously inspired genius, Latin American novelists conceived of writing as an arduous process deeply shaped by the environment, bodily affects, and the materiality of writerly technologies.

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.

Education & Appointments

Spec., Creative Writing, Casa de Letras
B.A., Literary Theory & Modern Literature, Universidad de Buenos Aires
M.Phil., Hispanic Studies, University of Glasgow
Ph.D., Iberian and Latin American Cultures, Stanford University
Postdoc., Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Cornell University

Most Recent Publications 

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. 

“Cómo banalizar la deconstrucción en solo cinco pasos. Usos, ¿abusos? y potencialidades del término ‘deconstrucción’ en el presente,” Luthor, Volume 53, 2022, 1-27.

“¿Puede la literatura hacer metafísica? Metafísica no-proposicional y aperturas inter-cosmológicas en ‘Meu tio o Iauaretê’ de João Guimarães Rosa,” Revista Iberoamericana, Issue 281, Volume 88, 2022, 927-38.

TALKS & CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

“Against Productivity: Unproductive Writing in Early Latin American Fiction,” Cornell University, April 2025.

“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, 2024.

La larga paciencia. Slimbook, 2024.