Axel Perez Trujillo
2023-2024
François Chevalier Fellow
Axel Pérez Trujillo is Assistant Professor in Hispanic Studies at Durham University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Alberta (Canada), having received support from the Izaak Killam Foundation to carry out his research on the ecological imaginaries of the plains in Latin America. This project included stays in Mexico (Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM) and Brazil (Instituto Histórico e Geográfico do Mato Grosso do Sul), culminating in the publication of his first monograph in Bloomsbury, entitled Imagining the Plains of Latin America: An Ecocritical Study (2021).
He has published several articles on ecological poetics in literary texts, especially highlighting the need to decolonise dominant ecological imaginaries that turn landscape into a resource for development. Thus, his research work lies at the intersection between ecology, philosophy and literature. His current research focuses on contemporary drought narratives in Ibero-America.
Projet de recherche
Building on her previous research on imaginaries of the plains in Latin American literature, the project's scope and methodology break new interdisciplinary ground in analysing the intersection between climate, narrative theory and environmental justice. As ecologists and philosophers have argued, there are troubling problems in representing large-scale climate change.
The project responds to the question posed by Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and Environmentalism of the Poor: 'how can we make image and narrative out of disasters that are slow and slow in coming' (3). One of the theses of the project is that representation, understood as a static image of a state of the world, cannot capture the most important dimension of climate change: its temporality. Hence, the project channels the narrative forms of contemporary writers in Ibero-America as they relate the experiences of communities vulnerable to prolonged droughts in order to offer a repertoire for finding concrete praxis to our current environmental urgency.
Sélection de publications
- 2022. “Exposed Insularity: Documenting an Island of Waste in Ilha das Flores by Jorge Furtado”, in Francisco J. Hernández Adrián and Antonio Gómez, eds., The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema, London, Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 131-151.
- 2021. Imagining the Plains in Latin America: An Ecocritical Study, London, Bloomsbury Academic.
- 2021. “Fleeing Ilex Paraguariensis: Yerba Mate Plantations in Horacio Quiroga and Augusto Roa Bastos”, in Chris Campbell et al., eds., Literary and Cultural Production, World Ecology, and the Global Food System, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 141-164.
- 2018. “Infinitesimal Poetics of the Sedimented Ground: The Pantanal in Manoel de Barros”, Mosaic Journal, vol. 51, n.º 3, pp. 71-87.
- 2017. “Galgos en el llano: la ecología oscura del campo en Intemperie de Jesús Carrasco”, Letras Hispanas: Revista de Literatura y Cultura, vol. 13, n.º 1, pp. 244-254.
