Dr. Manuela Luengas Solano is a cultural studies scholar of modern and contemporary Latin America, working at the intersection of environmental humanities, contemporary art and media, and cultural anthropology. Her research and teaching interests include climate and environmental justice, sound studies, Indigenous literatures, and the history of print and visual cultures in the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present. She is currently working on her book manuscript, River Archives: Sedimentation, Fluidity, and Futurity in Latin American Cultures, which brings together a wide-ranging corpus of film, travel writing, cartography, literature, and installation art, examining the role of rivers in Latin America’s modern history. Her book argues that, instead of passive ‘natural’ elements, rivers can be conceived as both historical archives and social actors for artists and communities in the region—they are complex entities holding traces of the past, while being active mediators of human and more-than-human relations. Through an interdisciplinary approach, River Archives offers a novel understanding of the region’s hydro-social territories, foregrounding rivers’ centrality in questions regarding political violence, race, migration, and post-colonial extractive cycles and their effective mediation of Latin American cultural production.
Prior to joining the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at University of Arizona, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center (2025-2026). She holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University (2025), an MA in Literary Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2018), and a BA in Anthropology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia (2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Contracorriente, Crisol, and World Literature Today, among others. Her first book, entitled Revista Mito: Libertad, situación y política del intelectual (1955-1962), on twentieth-century print culture in Colombia was published by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico Press in 2025.