Research Interests
20th and 21st-Century Latin American Literature and Film, with a focus on Mexico and Central America
Environmental Humanities: Posthumanism, Ecocriticism, and Animal Studies
Critical Theories of Race, Gender, and Disability
Research Description
Carolyn Fornoff's research engages Mexican and Central American culture through the lens of ecocriticism. It explores how artists and writers portray the intersection between environmental and social justice through representational modes that range from speculative fiction to the documentary.
Fornoff's in-process monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, considers contemporary representations of anthropogenic environmental change and critiques of the extractivist paradigm. It argues that the unpredictability of environmental rupture (and its corollaries, like drought and extinction) have put the future into doubt, prompting writers and artists in Mexico to reimagine ways of living on a planet governed by different climatic rules.
As part of broader research in the environmental humanities, Fornoff has co-edited two collections:
Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), co-edited with Bethany Wiggin and Patricia Kim, brings together interdisciplinary research on the question of time in the Anthropocene.
Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021), co-edited with Gisela Heffes, theorizes the rich cinematic production coming out of Latin America that attends to environmental questions.
Education
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
M.A. University of Pennsylvania
B.A. Rice University
Courses Taught
- SPAN 254: Introduction to Cultural Analysis
- SPAN 326: Beyond the Human: Animals in Latin American Culture
- SPAN 326: Mexican Cinema
- SPAN 467: Romance & Race in 19th century Latin American Literature
- SPAN 468: Latin American Natures
- SPAN 535: Extractivism and Environments in Latin American Cultural Production
- SPAN 572: Theory and Literary Criticism
Additional Campus Affiliations
Assistant Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Recent Publications
Fornoff, C. H., Kim, P. E., & Wiggin, B. (2021). Coda. In B. Wiggin, C. Fornoff, & P. E. Kim (Eds.), Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities University of Minnesota Press.
Fornoff, C. H., Kim, P. E., & Wiggin, B. (2021). Introduction: Environmental Humanities across Times, Disciplines, and Research Practices. In B. Wiggin, C. Fornoff, & P. E. Kim (Eds.), Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities University of Minnesota Press.
Fornoff, C., & Heffes, G. (Eds.) (2021). Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. SUNY Press.
Wiggin, B., Fornoff, C. H., & Kim, P. E. (2021). Timescales: Thinking across Ecological Temporalities. University of Minnesota Press.
Fornoff, C. H. (2020). La carne que habla: filosofía y poesía mè’phàà en la obra de Hubert Matiúwàa. Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, 90, 121-138.