Overview
Carolyn Fornoff’s research explores cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico and Central America. It asks how art helps narrate and make sense of problems like climate change that are temporally expansive and often difficult to see with the naked eye. She is the coeditor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021).
Fornoff’s first book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), traces how contemporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico have shifted away from art’s evidentiary function (its ability to prove environmental crisis) and toward more subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty that grapple with how the world could be imagined otherwise. It was awarded the 2025 LASA Mexico Forum Best Book in the Humanities Prize and an honorable mention for the 2025 LASA Environment Best Book Prize.
Prior to joining Cornell, Fornoff was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She grew up in Austin, Texas. She serves on the Hispanic Review and ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment) advisory boards, and recently cochaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. At Cornell, she is a member of the Humanities Council, the Environment and Sustainability curriculum committee, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies steering committee.
Fornoff is on sabbatical for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Research Focus
- Environmental Humanities: Ecocriticism, Posthumanism, Animal Studies
- Mexican and Central American Studies
- Literature, Film, and Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary Latin America
- Critical Race, Gender, and Disability Studies
Publications
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Museo Subacuático de Arte and the Eco-Aesthetic Gimmick.” World Exhaustion, edited by Gesine Müller and Ignacio Sánchez Prado. De Gruyter, 2025, pp. 179-192.
“Art.” Power Shift: Keywords for a New Politics of Energy, edited by Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel, West Virginia University Press, 2025, pp. 45-47.
“Aping King Kong in Hernán Robleto’s Una mujer en la selva.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, vol. 58, no. 1, 2024, pp. 83-106.
“Reflexive Extractivist Aesthetics.” FORMA Journal, vol. 2, no. 1, 2023, pp. 37-69. Awarded 2024 LASA Mexico Forum Best Article in the Humanities Prize.
“Extractivism.” Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics, edited by Jens Andermann, Gabriel Giorgi, and Victoria Saramago, De Gruyter, 2023, pp. 45-65.
“Greening Mexican Cinema.” Ecocinema Theory and Practice 2, edited by Stephen Rust, Selma Monani, and Seán Cubitt, Routledge, 2023, pp. 34-51. Awarded 2024 LASA Film Studies Section Best Article Prize.
“#BertaVive: Teaching Environmental Justice through Central American Culture.” Teaching Central American Literature in a Global Context, edited by Gloria Elizabeth Chacón and Mónica Albizúrez Gil, MLA Press, 2022, pp. 315-325.
“Blackness and Racial Melodrama in 1970s Mexican Cinema.” The Lost Cinema of Mexico, edited by Olivia Cosentino and Brian Price, University Press of Florida, 2022, pp. 142-165.