About
I am an associate professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago, where I study how Latin American culture imagines the environments it depends on and transforms. My work sits at the intersection of Brazilian studies, the environmental and energy humanities, and theories of fiction and mimesis, and it returns persistently to a single question: how do literature, film, and art shape the way societies understand the natural world—and the forces, from deforestation to electrification, remaking it?
My first monograph, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America (Northwestern University Press, 2021), argues that fiction is not a mirror of Latin American landscapes but a site where knowledge, imagination, and intervention are actively produced. Tracing how enduring literary images of forests, backlands, and deserts collide with lived experiences of deforestation and urbanization, the book examines the charged relationship between invented places and real ones. It received the Roberto Reis Book Award (Brazilian Studies Association, 2022), an honorable mention for the Antonio Candido Book Award (Brazil Section, Latin American Studies Association, 2022), and a place on the shortlist for the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Book Award.
My current book, Against the Current: Electricity, Environment, and Culture in Brazil, follows the electric current through a century of Brazilian art. It asks how artistic practice has shaped perceptions of how electrical energy is produced and consumed—and, conversely, how electricity has enabled, altered, and sometimes destroyed cultural objects. Far from celebrating electrification as a doorway to modernity, I argue, Brazilian artists across the decades met it with skepticism, irony, and critique, mounting a sustained challenge to the developmentalist creed that governed twentieth-century Brazilian politics. The project has been supported by a year-long fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and additional funding from the Franke Institute for the Humanities.
I have also co-edited two volumes that map the field I work in. The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2023), with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi, offers a comprehensive account of how Latin American art, activism, and critique confront the more-than-human world. Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2022), with Luca Bacchini and a winner of the ASLE Subvention Grant, is the first English-language collection to read Brazilian literature through the environmental humanities, animal studies, and Anthropocene studies—perspectives that unsettle the centrality of the human. I have edited two special issues as well: O Antropoceno na perspectiva da análise histórica (Topoi: Revista de História, 2023), with José Augusto Pádua, and Narratives of the Apocalypse (Journal of Lusophone Studies, 2022), with Chloe Hill.
My earlier book, O duplo do pai: O filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (É Realizações, 2013), and my articles have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including New Literary History, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Luso-Brazilian Review. I have co-directed research projects including “Fossil Capitalism in the Global South” (Neubauer Collegium, 2022–2023), and I currently co-direct the book series “SubAtlantic: Latin American, Caribbean, and Luso-African Ecologies” at De Gruyter.