Faculty Member

Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Program in Comparative Literature. I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Humanities from the Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru, and a PhD in Spanish from the University of Texas. My overall research, teaching, and outreach interests are the crosspollination between literary/cultural studies and social-ecological sustainability and resilience studies. The idea is to unleash the relevance of past and current literature, film and arts as sites of innovative reflection on social-ecological issues by nonspecialists. When the arts enter in collaboration with other knowledges and practices, they help with mobilizing people towards desirable sustainable transitions in their communities. Students are welcome into my courses 01:195:220 Our World: Social Justice and the Environment, 01:940: 462 Environment and Literature in the Hispanic World (in Spanish), the Honors Program interdisciplinary seminar “An Amazonian Journey,” and the summer study abroad programs offered by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. The main topic across these courses is how indigenous/aboriginal peoples are impacted by planetary and local environmental changes, and who and how is telling their stories of resilience and adaptation. I have published on sustainability with colleagues in the natural and social sciences, and on Amazonian literatures, environmental transdisciplinary research in literary studies, human microbiota conservation, indigenous environmentalisms, Latin American fiction, and Chicana/o literature.