Celina Osuna

Celina Osuna is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), affiliated with the College of Liberal Arts. Her work bridges Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms with desert studies, examining how arid landscapes shape cultural imagination and geopolitical relations. She holds a PhD from Arizona State University.

• Education: PhD in English from Arizona State University

Her research focuses on redefining deserts as sites of cultural abundance rather than barrenness, informed by her upbringing in El Paso and global desert collaborations. Key projects include the forthcoming monograph Desert Distortion (2025) and co-edited collection Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands (2024). She explores transnational environmental narratives in works like Thoreau’s writings and films such as Sicario, linking historical and contemporary border ecologies.

Public scholarship includes analyses of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and podcast contributions to the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. She advocates for interdisciplinary approaches to desert communities through symposia like “Ecologies of Justice” and emphasizes care for Latinx and Indigenous placemaking traditions.