Orit Gugenheim is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. After leaving home in Mexico City, she obtained her B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.
Gugenheim specializes in 20th-century Latin American narratives, with a focus on Jewish authorship and representation. Her dissertation traces how Jewish signifiers feature in the literary canon of the Latin American Boom—this survey includes an analysis of racialized depictions of Jewish characters in Mario Vargas Llosa’s fiction; the migration of the Medieval Christian trope, the Wandering Jew, as it emerges in the magical-realist setting of Gabriel García Márquez’s work, and so on.
Gugenheim has been awarded the Ganzfried Family Travel (2023) and the Translation Initiative (2024) fellowships, as well as a Visiting Scholar position at the NYU Center for the Study of Antisemitism (2026). Her work has appeared in Cuadernos Judaicos (2022) and she has a forthcoming publication in collaboration with Ilan Stavans in Latin American Jewish Studies (2026).