Cogut Institute for the Humanities
Center for Environmental Humanities at Brown

Macarena Gómez-Barris

Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Chair of Modern Culture and Media

Biography

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory, and artistic practice. She is author of four books including The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017), which examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism, and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (University of California Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (University of California Press, 2009) and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (University of Minnesota Press, 2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press. Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press), which considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She is on the Social Text Collective, serves as co-director of the Queer Aqui Project at Columbia University, and is on the executive editor board of GLQ. She received the Pratt Institute Research Recognition Award (2021–22) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni Award (2021–22). She is the author of dozens of esssays and curatorial events. She was founder and director of Global South Center, NYC. She organizes a new series called Writing Media Now hosted by the Department of Modern Culture and Media.