Giseli Tordin
Giseli Tordin is a Senior Lector of Spanish and Portuguese and the Director of the Portuguese Language Program.
Her scholarly interests include Latin American, Iberian, and Luso-Brazilian studies, the intersection of psychoanalysis, literature, and film, women filmmakers, decolonial feminism, memory, ecofeminism, and the teaching of Spanish and Portuguese as additional languages. Her work emphasizes transatlantic perspectives, contemporary literacies, the use of technology to create video essays and short films (documentaries and animation), didactic sequences, and project-based learning.
She coordinated the intermediate Spanish course, creating cohesive didactic sequences and activities, and designing it exclusively with authentic materials and projects that center the voices of minorities, including women and Indigenous communities. She also created the Portuguese curriculum, developing all didactic sequences, projects, and activities across all levels, replacing traditional textbooks with project-based learning, diverse authentic materials, and an interdisciplinary framework that fosters dialogue with university courses. Her approach is guided by anti-racist perspectives, enhancing immersion and fostering a sense of community. She teaches a variety of courses in both Spanish and Portuguese language and culture, including those that intertwine cinema, photography, literature, theater, and language. Among these are Brazilian Culture through Black Lives, Drama as Resistance, and Through Her Lenses: Women Filmmakers and Photographers of the Portuguese-Speaking World.
In addition to her teaching, Giseli created a series of interviews with her students titled Students of Portuguese and Spanish Interview Latin American and Iberian Women Authors and has directed public theatrical readings with her students, including Roda-Viva (by Chico Buarque), O Pagador de Promessas (by Dias Gomes), Novas Diretrizes em Tempos de Paz (by Bosco Brasil), and O Bailado do Deus Morto (by Flávio de Carvalho). She also launched the Yale Portuguese Students’ Digital Magazine, a platform dedicated to showcasing collaborative projects by students at Yale.
Her recent publications explore the writings of women who were hospitalized in asylums, as examined in her chapter “Ilhas de lucidez na obra de Stela do Patrocínio e Maura Lopes Cançado” in Ilhas de vozes em reencontros compartilhados (2021, ed. Susana Antunes), as well as how women authors foreground Afro identities in historical interpretation, challenging other narratives of modernity (as seen in the journal Faces de Eva, n. 51, 2025). She has also explored the interplay between ethnicity and aging in Latin American filmmaking, as reflected in her chapter “Retratos de la vejez en el cine brasileño contemporáneo” in Tecnologías de la Edad (2023, ed. Zecchi & Medina, Comares Editorial, Granada).