Continuing her humanistic training, which had culminated in Uruguay with degrees in Literature and Philosophy awarded by the Instituto de Profesores Artigas, she studied for a Master's degree in Philosophy at the Universidad Andrés Bello, in Caracas, Venezuela, working particularly with Arturo Ardao and other important academics from various countries. Afterwards, she migrated to the United States to pursue her Doctoral degree in Literature, at the University of Minnesota, under the direction of Hernán Vidal, which strengthen her orientation towards the studies of ideology, Marxism, and socio-historical approaches. During those years, Moraña worked intensively on Uruguayan culture under the dictatorship, particularly on issues of censorship and self-censorship, cultures of exile and historical memory.
Since the 1990s, Mabel Moraña's critical perspective became closely associated with the studies of Jesús Martin Barbero, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Nelly Richard, Ángel Rama and other representatives of Latin American Cultural Studies, with whom she has maintained close intellectual ties for many decades. Her critical work has been published by prestigious publishing houses, universities and private companies in the United States, Spain, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, France, among others, and her articles have appeared in numerous specialized magazines.[10][11]
In addition to her critical work, Mabel Moraña is known for her editorial work as well. She has edited and co-edited several books on Latin American socio-cultural issues, and was Director of Publications for the Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana for ten years, where she published the Revista Iberoamericana and five series of books, three of which were created by herself. The IILI publications and congresses during those years markedly modified the profile of this institution, giving way to Cultural studies and the critical-theoretical renewal of Literary Studies. Convergently, Moraña has organized numerous interdisciplinary congresses of international impact on cultural studies, social change, biopolitics, affections, migration, and many other topics, encouraging the intellectual interconnection between Latin America, North America, and the Caribbean, and promoting the dissemination of knowledge at all levels.[13]
She has been interviewed numerous times, on radio, television, and in periodicals from different countries.[14][15][16]
Works
Single-authored books
Chronological list of some of Mabel Moraña's books as single author.[17]
Literatura y cultura nacional en Hispanoamérica 1910–1940 (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literatures, 1984)
Políticas de la escritura en América Latina. De la Colonia a la Modernidad (Caracas: Ediciones eXcultura, 1997)
Viaje al silencio. Exploraciones del discurso barroco (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998)
Crítica impura. Estudios de literatura y cultura latinoamericanas (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana – Vervuert, 2004)
La escritura del límite (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana – Vervuert, 2010)
Inscripciones críticas. Estudios sobre cultura latinoamericana (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Cuarto Propio, 2014)
Bourdieu en la periferia. Capital simbólico y campo cultural en América Latina (Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 2014)
Churata postcolonial (Lima: Centro de Estudios Literarios Antonio Cornejo Polar, Latinoamericana Editores, 2015)
Arguedas/Vargas Llosa: Dilemmas and Assemblages. Translated by Andrew Ascherl (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
The Monster as War Machine. Translated by Andrew Ascherl (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2018)
Philosophy and Criticism in Latin America: From Mariátegui to Sloterdijk. Translated by Andrew Ascherl (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2020)
Pensar el cuerpo. Historia, materialidad y símbolo (Barcelona: Herder Editora, 2021)
Líneas de fuga. Ciudadanía, frontera y sujeto migrante (Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana – Vervuert, 2021)
"Nosotros, los bárbaros": tres narradores mexicanos en el siglo XXI (México: Bonilla Artigas Editores, 2021)
Anthologies of academic articles
Territorios y forasteros: retratos y debates latinoamericanos, edited by Alicia Ortega Caicedo (Guayaquil: Ediciones Universidad de las Artes, 2015)
Entre Incas y Pishtacos: Estudios sobre Literatura y Cultura Peruana (Lima: Centro de Estudios Literarios Antonio Cornejo Polar, 2018)
Momentos críticos. Literatura y cultura en América Latina (Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes, 2018)
^Palou, Pedro Ángel (2019). La ciudad crítica. Imágenes de América Latina en su teoría, crítica e historiografías literarias. Veracruz: Biblioteca de la Editorial de la Universidad Veracruzana. ISBN9786075027340.
^Literatures, Romance Languages and (May 4, 2017). "Mabel Moraña". Romance Languages and Literatures. Retrieved October 4, 2021.