Isabel Ortiz

Isabel is an 8th year graduate student in American Studies at Yale and an Emerging Scholars Fellow. Her dissertation traces the emergence of the modern Western self at the intersection of 20th century developments in capitalism, war, psychology, and occultism. Focusing on four technologies that each attempt to codify the self— film, the enneagram, the rotoscope, and the tarot— she asks what gave rise to the need to create new systems to discipline the personality in the first place and studies their role in sustaining gender, racial, and class hierarchy.