In this talk, Carolyn Fornoff will discuss her recent book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt Press, 2024). Her book assesses contemporary trends in the representation of environmental crisis in order to suggest that there has been a shift away from evidentiary modes focused on proving the existence of environmental harms, to more “subjunctive” modes that imagine the world as it could be or should be.

Carolyn Fornoff is assistant professor of Latin American studies at Cornell University. Her work examines how Mexican and Central American cultural production responds to environmental crisis. Her first monograph, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change, was published in 2024 with Vanderbilt University Press. She is also the co-editor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). Fornoff currently cochairs the Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession for the Modern Language Association.

This event is presented by the THI More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory Research Cluster.