Renata Ruiz Figueroa

Renata joined LAIC as a Ph.D. student in 2020. She holds a B.A. in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Her interests lie at the intersection between agrarian history, environmental humanities, visual culture and religious studies. Her research takes a trans-historical approach to explore the relations between the human and the non-human in processes of nation-building and the expansion of capitalist frontiers in modern Mexico, more recently focusing on the Nahua altepetl. She is also interested in the uses of history, the politics of space and time, the history of rural movements and transformations, and the ecology of cloud forests.

In addition, Renata is a member of the Colectivo Tochinanco, a working group that explores the interconnections between language, history, and the environment. With this project, Renata collaborates with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. (IDIEZ). As a Teaching Fellow at Columbia, she has taught Beginner Spanish II, Intermediate Spanish I, and a section of the course Hispanic Cultures II: Enlightenment Through Present titled Ecologies of Modernity.