معرفی
Valeria Meiller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at San Antonio's College of Liberal and Fine Arts. She holds a PhD in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from Georgetown University (2021), an M.S. from the same institution (2019), and a B.A. in Modern Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Buenos Aires (2014).
Her research specializes in Latin American literature and visual arts examined through environmental philosophy, cultural studies, and spatial theory. She is particularly known for developing the concept of 'necroterritories' in her book project exploring slaughterhouses and the politics of death in the Plata River basin. Meiller co-directed the award-winning film The Case of Meat and co-created the exhibition Matadero Modelo featuring 3D models of Francisco Salamone's slaughterhouses.
Meiller directs Ruge el bosque, a transnational project on multilingual environmental poetry that includes regional anthologies from the Southern Cone and Mesoamerica, with future volumes planned for the Caribbean, Andean States, and Amazon Basin. This project, which earned the NECLAS Best Digital Scholarship Award (2023), also features the research podcast Ecoteca and informs her second book project on bio- and linguistic diversity loss in extractivist economies.
As a poet, she has published four collections in Spanish, including El libro de los caballitos (2021) and El mes raro (2014), the latter forthcoming in English translation as The Odd Month (2024). Her scholarly work spans environmental humanities, animal studies, plant studies, and ecopoetry, with numerous refereed articles in journals like ISLE and Revista Hispánica Moderna.
- LASA Award of Merit in Film (2022)
- NECLAS Best Digital Scholarship Award (2023)
- Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant (2022)
- COLFA Nominee for High Impact Paper Award (2024)
- NCCLA Best Research Collaboration Award (2024)
Meiller teaches courses examining Venezuelan diasporic literature, plant studies, Latin American ecology, and ecopoetry in translation. Her collaborative work with Whitney DeVos on 'wetland poetics' has been particularly influential, analyzing how contemporary poetry from Argentine wetlands functions as both regionally-situated and planetary practice amid environmental crises and extractivist pressures.
