Carolyn FornoffView profile
Associate Professor
Carolyn Fornoff serves as Associate Professor of Latin American Studies in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Latina/o Studies Program and maintains active service roles including membership on the Humanities Council, Environment and Sustainability curriculum committee, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies steering committee. Currently on sabbatical for the 2025-2026 academic year, she continues to contribute to academic discourse through her editorial work on the Hispanic Review and ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment) advisory boards. Professor Fornoff's research explores cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America, with particular focus on Mexico and Central America. Her work investigates how art helps narrate and make sense of temporally expansive problems like climate change that are often difficult to perceive directly. She examines how contemporary filmmakers and writers have shifted from art's evidentiary function toward more subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty that grapple with alternative world imaginaries. Her scholarship intersects environmental humanities with critical race, gender, and disability studies, creating a rich interdisciplinary framework for understanding ecological challenges through cultural production. Fornoff's publication record demonstrates consistent engagement with environmental themes across Latin American cultural production. Her work spans analyses of Mexican cinema's environmental representations, Central American environmental justice movements, extractive industries' cultural dimensions, and underwater art installations. She has developed theoretical frameworks like 'reflexive extractivist aesthetics' while examining specific case studies from 1970s Mexican cinema to contemporary Central American activism. Her scholarship reveals how cultural works navigate the complex interplay between environmental crisis, visual representation, and social justice. 2025 LASA Mexico Forum Best Book in the Humanities Prize for Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change Honorable mention for 2025 LASA Environment Best Book Prize 2024 LASA Mexico Forum Best Article in the Humanities Prize for 'Reflexive Extractivist Aesthetics' 2024 LASA Film Studies Section Best Article Prize for 'Greening Mexican Cinema' Professor Fornoff has made significant editorial contributions as coeditor of Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021). She recently cochaired the Modern Language Association's Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession, reflecting her commitment to inclusive academic practices. Her scholarly trajectory demonstrates how environmental concerns intersect with broader questions of representation, justice, and cultural production in Latin America.
