Sarah Moody

Associate Professor of Spanish
Director, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
(on sabbatical, fall 2024)

Education

  • PhD & MA, University of California, Berkeley
  • BA, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Research Areas

  • Modernismo and women's writing in Latin America
  • Feminism, gender theory, aesthetics, and intellectual networks
  • Nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
  • Enslaved and formerly enslaved women authors in Cuba

Bio

Professor Moody’s research examines Modernismo and women’s writing in Latin American literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially focusing on the relationship between aesthetic systems and identity formulations like gender or nationalism. She has published on Delmira Agustini’s radically feminist poetics, on the journalism of women from Argentina and Brazil around the turn of the 20th century, and on newspaper chronicles and poetry in dialogue with urban reform in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.

Professor Moody’s forthcoming book, Las Raras, examines ideas of femininity that were both fundamental to Modernismo’s formation and exclusionary towards women’s active participation in the movement as writers and authors. Her study helps to explain why this important literary movement admitted no women writers unconditionally. The project explores the formation of the Modernista rhetoric of femininity, and goes on to consider women writers’ strategies to find literary success in spite of that rhetorical system, such as by attacking it directly or by circulating their work outside the movement’s systems of prestige and authority.

Dr. Sarah Moody's Spanish conversation course

Professor Moody teaches Latin American literature, ranging from the colonial period to the 20th century for undergraduates, and focusing on 1800-1915 at the graduate level. She also teaches LAS 401, the capstone course for the LACLS minor. She has directed several dissertations. At UA she directs the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program and serves as advisor for that program’s minor. She has also been the recent Faculty Advisor for Sigma Delta Pi, Beta Alpha chapter.

Her professional memberships include the Latin American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association.

Current Research

Moody is currently researching the Cuban magazine Minerva: Revista Quincenal Dedicada a la Mujer de Color (first epoch: 1888-89). This project was awarded a 2024 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend. Moody is also a CARI Fellow, 2024-26.

Selected Publications