Noa Vaisman

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Noa Vaisman received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University. She is currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled “Talk, Dreamwork, and Specters: (Re)Constructing Patterns of Self, Truth and Society in Present-Day Buenos Aires.” The book explores the social, legal and political processes of post-dictatorial collective rebuilding among middle-class porteños (the inhabitants of the capital city, Buenos Aires). Based on over two and a half years of fieldwork this work looks at the patterns that connect processes of social reconstruction with middle class porteños’ ways of being-in-the-world, modes of sociality and temporality.   

She is also engaged in a second research project: a book length investigation of the forced disappearance of infants during the last military dictatorship in Argentina and their subsequent raising by the perpetrators of the crime and their accomplices. She is particularly interested in the processes of identity reconstruction using DNA and other methods of identification. More recently, she has also been involved in thinking through the implications of the rapid developments in the natural sciences and in technologies on human rights and on our Western conceptualizations of the Subject. Last year she organized a conference on the theme at the University of Chicago, where she was a Postdoctoral Lecturer in Human Rights, and she is now planning an edited volume on the topic.

Email: nvaisman@wisc.edu