Manuela Luengas Solano

Manuela Luengas is a PhD candidate in Latin American and Iberian Cultures. She specializes in Latin American literature, art, and cinema from the nineteenth-century to the present, which she examines through the lenses of the environmental humanities, cultural studies, and anthropology. Her dissertation, "River Archives: Fluvial Practices and Imaginaries in Latin American Culture ", studies rivers in Colombia, Argentina and Paraguay as archives of political history, and as more- than-human actors with concrete aesthetic and social meanings. Through her interdisciplinary approach, her research on rivers allows for an understanding of Latin American hydro-social territories' common histories, in which water is a key actor in questions of nature, violence, race, and migration.

Her research interests also extend to other contemporary environmental and political concerns, as they are negotiated and explored in literature, art, and film. Prior to coming to Columbia University, she earned a BA in Anthropology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and an MA in Latin American Literatures from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She has experience working with national Archives at the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, doing fieldwork with agrarian communities, and has been involved in different research groups with a wide range of topics, like political subjectivities and popular press during the twentieth century, and the relations between aesthetics, nature and politics in Latin America.

She is the author of the book Revista Mito: Libertad, situación y polítical del intelectual (1955- 1962) forthcoming with UNAM and the Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas. Her articles and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Crisol and World Literature Today. During her seven semesters as an instructor, she has taught Spanish at the elementary and intermediate levels, survey courses on Hispanic Culture, and has designed and taught the advanced course "Water, Land, and Resistance in Latin America". She is currently a Kluge Graduate Mentor Fellow and will be teaching the Columbia Journey Seminar during the 2024-2025 academic year.