I am an interdisciplinary scholar of the US-Mexico borderlands—and, more broadly, the Hemispheric Americas. I hold a PhD in English and a Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities from Yale University. In 2020-21, I participated in the Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University; in 2021-22 and 2022-23, I was an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Vanderbilt University; finally, in 2023-24, I became an Assistant Professor in both the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University.

I am currently at work on two book projects: in the first, I show how “imagined environments” have shaped the US-Mexico borderlands since the mid-19th century, and in the second, I trace a tradition of “Latinx ecomedia” that reaches back to the colonial period. In both book projects, I assemble archives that reflect the diversity of the Americas: I shift between English and Spanish, compare elite forms (like the novel and the lyric) to popular ones (such as periodicos and corridos), and engage with many media (from 19th-century manuscripts to 20th-century photographs to 21st-century films). By analyzing such wide-ranging archives, I reveal relationships between race and space: at some points, I describe how mestizaje has manifested itself in communal land grants, while at other points, I demonstrate that whiteness has co-evolved with western water infrastructures. Through such interventions in critical race and ethnic studies, I retheorize the relationship between literature and the environment. Along with many other ecocritics, I argue that literary texts have articulated respectful attitudes toward society and nature. In contrast to most of my counterparts, however, I also show how these texts have reinforced the interlocking processes of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and ecological change.

Among other venues, I have published articles in American Literature, American Literary History, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, and Representations. In recognition of my research, I have received the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize (2023), the American Studies Association’s Annette Kolodny Prize (2023), American Literature’s Norman Foerster Prize (2020), the Johannes Gutenberg University’s Obama Dissertation Prize (2020), the Yale English Department’s Best Dissertation Prize (2020), and an Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Graduate Student Paper Award (2019). I have also held fellowships at the Beinecke Library, the Huntington Library, and the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration.

As part of my effort to cultivate conversations across literary studies, ethnic studies, and the environmental humanities, I serve as the Inter-Institutional Liaison for ASA/ASLE, a Board Member of Post45, and an Executive Committee Member of the MLA Forum for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities.

Before beginning my academic career, I taught at a high school in New York City and an elementary school in Meco, Spain. I earned my BA at Wesleyan University, and I grew up in Tucson, Arizona. 

You can download my CV here. You can find me on Twitter here. You can reach me at can2162 at columbia dot edu