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. Recent articles focus on Eduarda Mansilla’s daring interpretation of a foundational myth of Argentine national identity in the mid-19th century, as well as on the complex gender philosophies in Manuel Ugarte’s early literary work on Paris. She is also interested in Brazil’s relationship to the rest of Latin America, and in literary and journalistic responses to city modernization and to European modernity.

Professor Moody’s current book project, Las Raras: Gendered Aesthetics, Women’s Writing and Intellectual Networks in Spanish-American Modernismo, 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.

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 is also 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.

Research Groups

EDGRAL, Estudios Decimonónicos de Género y Raza y en América Latina (Nineteenth-Century Studies of Gender and Race in Latin America)

• Heroicidades latinoamericanas: El lugar de las utopías del siglo XIX hasta nuestros días. Volume co-edited with Drs. Mónica González García (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Valparaíso) and Astrid Santana Fernández de Castro (Universidad de la Habana). With an introduction, “Las fracturas del mármol. Heroicidades latinoamericanas a contrapelo,” co-authored with Mónica González-García. Forthcoming.
• “Discapacitados, inmigrantes, obreros y mujeres profesionales: Marginalidad como heroísmo nacional en Stella y Mecha Iturbe, de César Duáyen.” Forthcoming.
• “Clorinda en el Cosmópolis: Espacio urbano y comunidad intelectual en Buenos Aires.” Forthcoming.
• “Brazilian Symbolism and Hispanic-American Modernismo: Resonance Across the Luso-Hispanic Divide.” Beyond Tordesillas: Critical Essays in Comparative Luso-Hispanic Studies. Eds. Richard A. Gordon and Robert Patrick Newcomb. The Ohio State UP, Oct. 2017, pp. 149-61.
• “Women of Paris, World Literature, and a Counter-Mythology of the Metropolis in Manuel Ugarte’s Early Literary Work.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, volume 93, number 9, October 2016, pp. 995-1007.
• “Eduarda Mansilla’s Mestizo Argentina: Orphanhood, Transnationalism, and Race in Lucía Miranda (1860).” Decimonónica: Journal of Nineteenth Century Hispanic Cultural Production, volume 12, number 2, summer 2015, pp. 14-29.
• “Exiled in Modernity: City Change, Nostalgia and Mário Pederneiras in Kosmos.” Journal of Lusophone Studies (formerly ellipsis: Journal of the American Portuguese Studies Association), number 12, 2014, pp. 259-79.
• “Poetic Form and City Form in the Fin de siglo: Ornamentation and Regularity in Rubén Darío and Buenos Aires.” Latin American Literary Review, volume 42, number 83, Jan.-June 2014, pp. 75-96. Available online through JSTOR.
• “Radical Metrics and Feminist Rebellions: Agustini Rewrites Darío’s Prosas profanas.” Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana, volume 43, number 1, May 2014, pp. 57-67. Available online through JSTOR and other sources.
• “Latin American Women Writers and the Periodical Press, 1890-1910.” Letras Femeninas, volume 36, number 2, Winter 2010, pp. 141-58. Available online through JSTOR and other sources.