New Cabell Hall 475
On Leave 2024-2025 academic year

Research Summary

I'm an author, a professor, and a total word nerd.

I write about how language shapes us and how it can unmake us, most recently in a piece soon to appear in Public Books. I'm also a feminist caregiver for a loved one with primary progressive aphasia, a neurodegenerative condition that impairs the ability to speak, read, write, and understand language. As an Ambassador for the National Aphasia Association, my work aims to raise awareness about communication disorders through public writing and activism.

As a scholar, I specialize in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, art, and culture from Latin America and the Caribbean. My academic books and articles examine representations of the tropical Americas from decolonial and environmental humanities perspectives. I’m interested in how both canonical and emerging literary texts and works of art engage with environmental change and imagine possible ecological futures. You can read more of my research on academia.edu.

At the University of Virginia, I’m a core faculty member in the Environmental Humanities, a founding director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship in Caribbean Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, a co-founder of the Greater Caribbean Studies Network, an affiliate of Latin American Studies, and an active faculty member in the Ph.D. program in Spanish. From 2020-2023, I held the Lisa Smith Discovery Chair. Beginning in 2025, I will serve on the Editorial Board of the University of Virginia Press.

In the profession, I’ve served on the Peer Advisory Board of PMLA (2020-2023) and am currently on the Editorial Boards of the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. I regularly serve as a reader for university press manuscripts.

Education

Ph.D., Yale University

M.A., Yale University

B.A., Barnard College, Columbia University

Recent Publications

Books

 Mourning El Dorado: Literature and Extractivism in the American Tropics. University of Virginia Press, 2019.

Honorable Mention: Latin American Studies Association Amazonia section Best Book Prize, 2020.

Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives. Vanderbilt University Press, 2012.

Articles and Book Chapters from the last few years:

“An Ecological Marvelous Realism: Carpentier’s Teeming American Tropics” Carpentier in Context. Ed. Anke Birkemaier. Cambridge University Press. Forthcoming in 2025.

“The Elusive Promise of El Dorado in the Latin American Literary Imagination.” El Dorado: Myths of Gold. Art catalog essay. The Americas Society, January 2024.

“Locura tropical e innovación literaria en La vorágine.” La vorágine: centenario de un clásico latinoamericano. Eds Felipe Martínez Pinzón y Jennifer French. U de los Andes, 2024, pp. 137-147.

“A Multispecies Caribbean: The Aesthetics of Ecological Reinvention in Art by Dhara Rivera.” Small Axe: A Journal of Caribbean Criticism. No. 73. March 2024, pp 20-38.

“Coasts in Crisis: Caribbean Arts and Cultures After Hurricanes.” Co-authored with Winnie Pérez Martínez and Rebecca Elise Foote. archipelagos: a journal of Caribbean digital praxis. 3,000 word explanatory essay to accompany digital project review and publication of public-facing humanities website http://coastsincrisis.net/. June 2023. http://archipelagosjournal.org/issue07/rogers-etal-coasts.html

“Art and Debt in the Oldest Colony: Creative Resistance in Contemporary Puerto Rican Culture.” The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms. Edited by Mariano Siskind and Guillermina de Ferrari. Routledge, 2022, 234-246.

“Eco-Magical Realism: An Eco-critical Interpretation of the Hurricane in Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. Volume 28, number 4, Winter 2021, 1579-1598.

"Rita Indiana’s Queer Interspecies Caribbean and the Hispanic Literary Tradition,” Small Axe Salon, (Duke UP). July 30, 2020, http://smallaxe.net/sxsalon/discussions/rita-indianas-queer-interspecies-caribbean-and-hispanic-literary-tradition.

“Notas del viaje a la Gran Sabana (Notes of the Trip to the Great Savannah) by Alejo Carpentier.” Translation and Introduction for “Little Known Documents,” PMLA, vol. 134, no. 5, October 2019, pp. 1104-1108.

 “‘El ágora entre manglares:’ la arquitectura griega en El siglo de las luces de Alejo Carpentier.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 53, no.1, May 2019, pp. 283-303.

“The Environmentalism of Poor Women of Color in Mayra Santos Febres’s Nuestra Señora de la Noche.” Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. Routledge, 2019.

“Nostalgia and Mourning in Milton Hatoum’s Órfãos do Eldorado.” In Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the Amazon. Edited by Javiar Uriarte and Felipe Martínez Pinzón. Liverpool University Press, 2019, 248-266.

Recent Authored Reviews:

Review of American Mediterraneans: A Study in Geography, History, and Race by Susan Gillman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. In Comparative Literature Studies. Volume 60, number 4, 2023, pp. 789-794.

Review of Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography After the Rubber Boom. By Amanda Smith. Liverpool University Press, 2021. In Revista Hispánica Moderna. Volume 76, number 1. June 2023, pp. 115-117.

Review of Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Environment in Latin America by Victoria Saramago, Flashpoints. Northwestern University Press, 2020. In Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Volume 55, number 3. Octubre 2021.

Review of America Unbound:  Encyclopedic Literature and Hemispheric Studies by Antonio Barrenechea. University of New Mexico Press, 2016. In Modern Fiction Studies. Volume 64, number 2, Summer 2018.

Review of Proust’s Latin Americans by Rubén Gallo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Comparative Literature Studies. Volume 54, number 1, 2016. 256-260.

Review of Magical Realism and the History of the Emotions in Latin America. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015. In Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production in the Luso-Hispanic World. 2: 6. Fall 2016. Online.