Profile

Oriele Benavides is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University, where she is writing a thesis entitled Irradiations of a plural body under construction. Literature and feminist discourses in Latin America during the 80s. In her dissertation, she evaluates several women’s encounters that took place in Latin America at the end of the past century, articulating simultaneously and in a new way artistic expression, street mobilization, literary and cultural theory, feminist activism and democratic discourse about the role of women and non-masculine citizenships.

Her research interests are focused on cultural and literary criticism in Latin American literature of the XX century, while considering the triangulation between desire, jouissance and writing, the apparent antinomies between the body and the archive, as well as social struggles and the unstable and prolific role that some literatures can play in it.

Born and raised in Caracas, she pursued undergraduate studies at the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV) and Master studies at the Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB), alongside studies in Lacanian psychoanalysis at the Nueva Escuela Lacaniana (Nel Caracas). Before coming to Princeton, Oriele taught for two years at the USB where she was a full-time lecturer in the Department of Language and Literature.

She has collaborated with academic and non-academic publications, as part of the funding team of the upcoming magazine The Hare, and of the student-run organization The Boquitas Pintadas Club, both at Princeton. Since Fall 2022, Oriele is also serving as a Resident Graduate Student at New College West.