Renata Ruiz Figueroa

Renata joined LAIC as a Ph.D. student in 2020. She holds a Licenciatura (BA) in History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

Her current research explores the relations between the human and the more-than-human within long-term processes of modernity and the expansion of capitalist frontiers in Mexico. In particular, her work focuses on the tensions between Mesoamerican ontologies and state-driven projects of territorial configuration linked to different notions of nature, politics, and property. She examines these dynamics across historical periods, engaging interdisciplinary approaches that combine environmental humanities, agrarian and legal history, history of religion, and visual and cultural studies.

Renata is currently an Incite Institute Doctoral Dissertation Fellow and a research assistant for the Let’s Talk Climate in the Humanities! project at Columbia's Language Resource Center. She has also been a visiting researcher at the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia, as well as at UNAM's Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas.

Her broader interests include the uses of history, the politics of space/time, the history of rural transformations, and the ecology of cloud forests. She is a founding member of the Colectivo Tochinanco, a working group that explores the interconnections between language and the environment to produce educational materials for Nahuatl linguistic and cultural revitalization. Through this project, she collaborates with the Instituto de Docencia e Investigación Etnológica de Zacatecas, A.C. (IDIEZ) and is part of the Community-Driven Co-Production Earth Network at Columbia’s Climate School and The Center for Science and Society.

As a Teaching Fellow at Columbia, Renata has taught elementary and intermediate Spanish, and designed and taught a section of the course Hispanic Cultures II: Enlightenment Through Present, titled Ecologies of Modernity.