Valeria Meiller
Assistant Professor, Modern Languages and Literatures
Contact
- MH 4.01.18
- valeria.meiller@utsa.edu
- www.valeriameiller.com
Bio
Valeria Meiller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She specializes in Latin American literature and the visual arts, which she examines from the lenses of environmental philosophy, cultural studies, and spatial theory. Her book project, Necroterritories: Slaughterhouses and the Politics of Death, explores how cultural materials from the Plata River basin have shaped a regionally specific understanding of slaughtering sites. As part of the research leading to this manuscript, she co-directed the film The Case of Meat, which received a 2022 LASA Award of Merit in Film, and co-created the exhibition Matadero Modelo featuring 3D models of Francisco Salamone’s slaughterhouses created through photogrammetry. She has also published articles related to this project, including “Necroterritories: the Politics of Life and Death at the Brazilian Slaughterhouse” forthcoming in The Environment in Brazilian Culture. As part of her contributions to the environmental humanities in Latin American Studies, she is co-editing the volume Unpredictable Architectures: The Aesthetics and Politics of Gardening in Latin America, and the issue Still Lives: The Inhuman in Latin American Culture.
Meiller is also the director of Ruge el bosque, a transnational project on multilingual environmental poetry that entails the publication of a series of regional anthologies. So far, she has co-edited an anthology reuniting ecopoetic expressions from the Southern Cone and is currently preparing a second anthology on the Mesoamerican region. Subsequent volumes will focus on poetry from the Caribbean, the Andean States, and the Amazon Basin. Ruge el bosque has been awarded a NECLAS Best Digital Scholarship Award in 2023 and a Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant in 2022. The project also entails a research podcast, Ecoteca, which contextualizes the poetry featured in the anthologies within contemporary environmental and social challenges faced by these regions. Conceived as public facing and collaborative research, Ruge el bosque also informs the preliminary stages of Meiller’s second book project, which will deal with the loss of bio- and linguistic diversity as interrelated phenomena in the context of extractivist economies. Some early ideas around this work can be found in her co-authored article “Wetland Poetics: Regional Situatedness as Planetary Practice” published by ISLE in 2023.
A poet herself, Meiller is the author of four poetry books in Spanish, including El libro de los caballitos (Caleta Olivia 2021), Tilos (La propia cartonera 2010), and El Recreo (El fin de la noche 2010). In 2024, her title El mes raro (Dakota Editora 2014) will appear in English translation as The Odd Month with Black Ocean. Described by translator Whitney DeVos as “ecologically engaged”, this book “charts a dystopian, lyrical landscape at the intersection of the twentieth-century agroindustry in Argentina and the devastating drought in the region from 2008 to 2009.” English excerpts of the manuscript have appeared in ISLE, Azonal, Denver Quarterly, The Chicago Review, The Massachusetts Review, and won the 2021 Spring Contest in Translation at Columbia Review.
Degrees
- PhD in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, Georgetown University, 2021
- M.S. in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies, Georgetown University, 2019
- B.A. in Modern Literature and Literary Theory, University of Buenos Aires, 2014
