Green Matters: Environmental Literature, Art, and Activism in Latin America and the Latinx World.

The 2022 Alvarez Seminar will host 4 guest speakers:

March 23 Gisela Heffes, Ph.D.
Latin American Contributions to Environmental Humanities: New Perspectives
Heffes is a Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Rice University. She is the co-editor of The Latin American EcoCultural Reader (2020) and the edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021). Her most recent fictions are Sophie La Belle (a bilingual novella with images, 2016); the novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020); and the bilingual poetry collection El cero móvil de su boca/The Zero Mobile of Its Mouth (2020).

March 30.  Fernando A. Flores, Author
Reading and Conversation with author of "Tears of the Trufflepig"
Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tear s of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor.com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. His collection of stories Valleyesque is forthcoming in May 2022. He lives in Austin, Texas.

PAST EVENTS:

Feb 9 Elizabeth Pettinaroli, Ph.D.
Ecocritical Perspectives in Literature, Cartography, and Activism in Lake Atitlán
Pettinaroli is an associate professor of Spanish at Rhodes College specializing in Ecocritical Perspectives in Literature, Cartography, and Activism in Lake Atitlán. Her scholarship is dedicated to ecocriticism and elaborations of notions of space and place in competing visions of globality. She is also the founder, director, and editor of Memphis Cartonera, a cooperative publishing house dedicated to ecocritical praxis in collaboration with counterparts in Latin America.

March 2 Ilka Kressner, Ph.D.
Elemental Empathy: Forms of Appealing to the Senses of Smell, Taste, and Touch in Contemporary Ecocritical Films from Latin America
Kressner is Associate Professor of Spanish at the State University of New York at Albany. Her scholarship and teaching examine Latin American literature, film, and visual arts (20th-21st centuries), from a variety of cultural and national contexts, often from a comparative perspective. She is interested in theoretical approaches to conceptions of space in art, intermediality, and ecocriticism.

This series is made possible by the Carlos and Malú Álvarez Fund for MAS