Santiago Acosta

Santiago Acosta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom,explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental shifts of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is the co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde el Sur, currently under contract at Brill Academic Publishers. Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His fourth and most recent collection, El próximo desierto (The Coming Desert), earned him the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza,” awarded in Guadalajara, Mexico, by the International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences. He has received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26. 

Victoria Saramago

Victoria Saramago is associate professor of Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literatures and cultures with a focus on the environmental humanities, the energy humanities, the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene, fiction theory, mimesis, and interdisciplinary approaches to literature and the environment. Her award-winning book, Fictional Environments: Mimesis, Deforestation, and Development in Latin America, was published in 2021 by Northwestern University Press. She has recently co-edited two books: The Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (De Gruyter, 2023) and Literature Beyond the Human: Post-Anthropocentric Brazil (Routledge, 2022) . She is also the author of O duplo do pai: O filho e a ficção de Cristovão Tezza (É Realizações, 2013), and her articles have been published in journals such as Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Luso-Brazilian Review, among others.

Paige Andersson

Paige Andersson is the Executive Director of Student Success in the School of Education at Indiana University, Bloomington. Prior to coming to IU, she was an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at DePauw University. She holds a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on the racialized and environmental colonial legacies of modern-day Mexico, the politics of care work in Latin America, and teaching about Latin American migration and race.

Brian Whitener

Brian Whitener is an Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo and author of Crisis Cultures: The Rise of Finance in Mexico and Brazil (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), Face Down (Timeless Infinite Light, 2016), and The 90s (speCt!, 2022). He is an editor on the forthcoming books: Border Abolition Now (Pluto Press, 2024), Raquel Gutiérrez: In Defense of Common Life (Common Notions, 2024) and Abolir ya: otra justicia es posible (Andromeda, 2024). Other writing or translation projects include De gente común: Arte, política y rebeldía social, edited with Lorena Méndez and Fernando Fuentes (Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, 2013) and the translations of Grupo de Arte Callejero: Thoughts, Actions, Practices (Common Notions, 2019) and Genocide in the Neighborhood: State Violence, Popular Justice, and the ‘Escrache’ (Common Notions, 2023).

Orlando Bentancor

Orlando Bentancor is an associate professor at Barnard College/Columbia University. He received his BA in Philosophy from the Universidad de la República (Montevideo, Uruguay) in 1997 and his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) from the University of Michigan in 2005. Before joining the Barnard faculty, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (2005-2008) and he also held a visiting appointment at the department of Comparative Literature at Princeton (2007-2008). He is the author of The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Perú (2017), published by Pittsburgh University Press. His current interests are world-ecology, eco-Marxism, and speculative fiction. Bentancor has published articles in Hofstra Hispanic Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

Joseph Staten

Joseph Staten is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Illinois Chicago. His dissertation, Literalism: Meaning After Materiality, concerns the material dimension of medium as both threat and opportunity in modernist and postmodern poetry, visual art, and theory. His writing has appeared in Nonsite and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Marina Vishmidt

Marina Vishmidt is currently the professor of art theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). Most recently she has edited Speculation for the Documents of Contemporary Art series (Whitechapel/MIT 2023).