Giseli Tordin

Giseli Tordin is currently a Senior Lector I of Spanish and Portuguese, coordinator of the Portuguese language program, and director of the Portuguese placement exam. In 2019, she launched the Yale Portuguese Students’ Digital Magazine, which aims at sharing some collaborative projects carried out by the students of Portuguese at Yale. 

Her scholarly interests include Latin American studies, psychoanalysis, literature, and film, decolonial feminism, use of technology in Humanities, women filmmakers, Spanish and Portuguese as an additional language, didactic sequences, and contemporary literacies.

Giseli received her Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures, Languages, and Cultures from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2017. She specializes in contemporary Hispanic and Brazilian literatures and films. Giseli spent a year as a doctoral graduate student at the Exchange Program with the University of Oviedo, in Spain, where she taught Spanish for foreigners. Her other degrees are an M.A. in Literary Theory with focuses on Argentinian and Brazilian literatures, a B.S. in Molecular Biology, and a B.A. in Letras (Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, and Literature) from the University of Campinas (Unicamp, Brazil). Giseli was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Dickinson College and prior to come to US, her experiences in Humanities also include a participation in a social project to develop teaching materials for adult unschooled Portuguese-language learners, and Spanish language teaching in high school.

At Yale, Giseli has taught all levels of Spanish and Portuguese languages and created new courses, such as Brazilian Culture through Black Lives, Drama in Portuguese, Portuguese through Films, among others. She also directed along with her students public theatrical readings of two plays: Roda-Viva (by Chico Buarque), and O pagador de promessas (by Dias Gomes), at the Jonathan Edwards College theater. Her contributions towards the Spanish and Portuguese Language Studies include the development of didactic sequences and activities only based on authentic materials.

Her recent research focuses on the writing of women while they were hospitalized in asylums. An example is her chapter on “Ilhas de lucidez na obra de Stela do Patrocínio e Maura Lopes Cançado” for Ilhas de vozes em reencontros compartilhados, 2021 (ed. Susana Antunes). Her other researches include the intersectionality of violence in Latin American literature, the interplay between ethnicity and aging in the Latin American Women’s Filmmaking, and the new perspectives of Spanish and Portuguese languages teaching.