About
María is a scholar from the Colombian Andes and a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Studies at Duke University. Her research traces how modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts engage critically with environmental histories of extraction and political violence.
Her interdisciplinary scholarship bridges environmental humanities, political ecology, literary theory, and visual studies. In her doctoral dissertation, she traces how contemporary visual artists and literary writers reclaim Latin American deserts as sites of environmental necromancy, ecologies binding the living and the dead, to contest neoliberal extraction.
Her academic writing appears in Revista Chilena de Literatura and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, among other academic journals. In the summer of 2025, she served as a Curatorial Fellow at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. María holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Literature, with a minor in Philosophy, from Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. In addition to her academic research, she is a multidisciplinary artist.
Email: mpm61@duke.edu