Michelle Rada

Michelle Rada is a Postdoctoral Associate and Franke Postdoctoral Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University, with research spanning psychoanalysis, literary and visual modernism, feminism, media studies, and critical theory.

Her educational background includes:

• Ph.D. in English, Brown University (2024)

Dr. Rada's research centers on the "ornamental unconscious" in transnational modernist literature and psychoanalytic theory, examining how texts from London, Dublin, Caracas, and Buenos Aires negotiate tensions between functional form and ornamental excess. She traces the circulation of aesthetic movements and theories of subjectivity across the Atlantic in the early 20th century, arguing that ornament embodies a formal logic of surplus, emptiness, and error at modernity's crisis of meaning. Her work engages with Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Teresa de la Parra, and Adolfo Bioy Casares through close readings of formally experimental literature.

She has received the Franke Postdoctoral Fellowship and serves as:

• Associate editor of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
• Senior editor of Parapraxis (a public-facing psychoanalytic magazine)
• Editor of Critical Times

Dr. Rada has taught courses on global modernism, film theory, and psychoanalytic cultural criticism at Emerson College and Brown University. She is currently contributing to Yale's 2024-25 Franke Lectures and Seminar on "Architectures of Illness," focusing on intersections of illness, architecture, and cultural theory.