Vered Engelhard

Vered Engelhard

Profile

Vered Engelhard is a PhD student in Latin American and Iberian Cultures. They research at the intersection of cultural anthropology, political ecology, and performance studies. They have a special interest in localized knowledges, living archives, communitarian territorial feminism, territorial struggles, and communal forms of governance. Their dissertation focuses on the ancestral technology of water sowing and harvesting across the Peruvian Andes. Combining work on the ground with close readings of technical reports, community maps, institutional releases, drawings, and communal acts, they examine how water acts as a cultural agent through which we can map conflicting ideas and practices of development, planning, and well-being (buen vivir). Engelhard works with the Asociación de Siembra y Cosecha de Agua (ASyCA), a collective dedicated to research and activism in watersheds in the Pacific-facing Andes.

In addition to academic research, Engelhard performs in various venues and DIY spaces in New York and Lima as their experimental music project Canto Villano. Utilizing portable instruments like flutes, pututos, shakers, chimes and recorders, and amplifying present elements such as wind, water and stones; their music is always emergent of the place of its happening. They are also a member of the OPERA Ensemble, a group of composers and performers working in the intersections of music and environmentalism. 

As a Teaching Fellow at Columbia, they have taught Beginner Spanish II, Intermediate Spanish I, and an Advanced Spanish class on Decolonizations: Real Worlds and Possible Worlds. In the Spring, they will be teaching Feminist Ecologies in Latin America: Politics and Poetics of Decolonization.