Elizabeth Pettinaroli

Elizabeth M. Pettinaroli's research and scholarship are dedicated to the environmental humanities and to study elaborations of space and place in competing visions of globality across Latin America and the Latinx world. Her volume Ecofictions, Ecorealities, and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World (Routledge, 2020) with A. M. Mutis and I. Kressner, delves into Latin American and Latinx writing, film, visual, and performing arts to offer new perspectives on ecological violence. Building on the notion of "slow violence" (Rob Nixon) this work explores processes of environmental destruction that are not immediately visible, and investigates how writers, cultural activists, filmmakers, and visual and performance artists across the region conceptualize, visualize, and document this invisible but far-reaching realm of violence that so tenaciously resists representation. Her previous volume, Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination (HIOL, 2013) with A. M. Mutis, underscores an intellectual turn in Hispanic and Lusophone Studies toward inquiry into the environment, and more specifically, the material, metaphysical, and literary “nature” emblematic of rivers as boundary and as connection; as paths to death and life; as emblems of both transformation and an anchoring of identity; as signs of dissolution and transformation; and as embodiment of change and continuity. Professor Pettinaroli has also contributed chapters to the History of Colombian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2016) and articles on the elaboration of space and place, the invention of the global, notions of nature, and bibliodiversity in several academic journals.

Professor Pettinaroli's creative scholarship includes the founding and directing of Memphis Cartonera, a cooperative publishing house dedicated to ecocritical praxis, translation, and engaged learning in collaboration with counterparts in the Nuevo South (a diversifying South) and throughout Latin America. She is also a board member and faculty of the Institute for Health Equity and Community Justice at Rhodes College, where she contributes to train healthcare providers with skills to create a culture of equity that reaches across all domains of the healthcare system. 

Selected Publications

Books and book-length publications

Ecologies of Resistance in Latin America and the Latinx World. Forthcoming.

Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World.  Co-editor with Ilka Kressner and Ana María Mutis. Routledge, 2020.

Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination. Co- editor with Ana María Mutis. Hispanic Issues Online. 12. U. of Minnesota P, 2013.

Articles and Chapters

“Fetishism of Form, Temporalities of Waste, and Slow Violence in Cartonera Publishing of the Triple Frontier (Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina).” In: Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. Routledge, 2020.  

“Cosmography, Ethnography, and the Literary Imagination of the New Kingdom of Granada.” In: History of Colombian Literature. Ed. Raymond Williams. Cambridge UP. 2016.

“Watershed of Sorrows: The Epic of Impossibility and New Theorizations of Tropicalia in El epítome de las conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada.” In: Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination. Eds. Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis. Hispanic Issues Online. 12. U. of Minnesota P, 2013.

“The Critical Metageographies of the Indies in Andrés Gonzáles de Barcia’s Introducción al Ensayo Cronológico para la historia general de la Florida.” Dieciocho: Hispanic Enlightenment. 36.1 (Fall 2013) pp. 1-25.

“The Arauco and Troy in the Alpujarras: Global Visions and Local Destinies in Guerras Civiles de Granada”.  Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 13:4 (2012), 408-421.

“Reason and Cognition in the Auto de los Reyes Magos and Alfonsi’s Dialogue Against the Jews.” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies. 4.2 (September 2012) pp. 185-197.

“Emplacing the Orient in Mexico: Topographic Mythologies in  Eugenio Salazar y Alarcón’s ‘Descripción de la Laguna.’” Colonial Latin American Review. 19.3 (December 2010) pp. 373-391.

Co-authored

“Introduction.” In: Ecofictions, Ecorealities and Slow Violence in Latin America and the Latinx World. Routledge, 2020.

“Visions of Nature: Colombian Literature and the Environment from the Colonial Period to the Nineteenth Century." In: History of Colombian Literature. Ed. Raymond Williams. Cambridge UP, 2016.

“Introduction”. In: Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination. Eds. Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis. Hispanic Issues Online. 12. U. of Minnesota P, 2013.

Reviews

Periplo hasta las regiones ubicadas al sur del equinoccio. Alejandro Geraldini. Ed. Carmen González Vázquez and Jesús Paniagua Pérez. Renaissance Quarterly. 63.4 (Winter 2010) pp. 1300-1301.

“Mio Cid Studies: ′Some Problems of Diplomatic′ Fifty Years On.”  Ed. by Alan Deyermond, David G. Pattison, & Eric Southworth.  Papers of the Medieval Hispanic Research Seminar, 42. 2002. La corónica. 32.2 (2004) pp. 242-243.