Macarena Gómez-Barris

Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Chair of Modern Culture and Media

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on the decolonial environmental humanities, authoritarianism and extractivism, queer Latinx epistemes, media environments, racial ecologies, cultural theory and artistic practice.

She is author of four books including, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University Press, 2017) that examines five scenes of ruinous extractive capitalism. Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (UC Press 2018), a text of critical hope about the role of submerged art and solidarities in troubled times. She is also author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor with Herman Gray of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). She is series editor with Diana Taylor of Dissident Acts at Duke University Press.

Her forthcoming book is At the Sea’s Edge (Duke University Press) that considers colonial oceanic transits and the generative space between land and sea. She is on the Social Text Collective, co-Director of the Queer Aqui Project at Columbia University, and on the Executive Editor Board of GLQ. She received the Pratt Institute Research Recognition Award (2021-2022) and the University of California, Santa Cruz Distinguished Alumni Award (2021-2022). She is the author of dozens of essays and curatorial events. She was founder and director of Global South Center, NYC. She organizes a new series called Writing Media Now hosted by the Department of Modern Culture and Media.