Profile

Gisela Heffes received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 2007. Her research interest focuses on topics such as city and rural spatialities, utopias, environmental narratives, displacement and migration. She is the editor of the anthology Judíos/Argentinos/Escritores (1999), and two monographs: Las ciudades imaginarias en la literatura latinoamericana (2008) and Políticas de la destrucción / Poéticas de la preservación. Apuntes para una lectura (eco)crítica del medio ambiente en América latina (2013). Las ciudades is a study of the literary representations of non-existent urban spaces and their significance in the wider political and cultural framework of Latin America. Políticas de la destrucción examines narratives from the mid-twentieth century to the present that are related to the environment in Latin America and analyzes how these texts refer to both the conservation and destruction of nature. This book received the First Honorable Mention by the Southern Cone Section at the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 2015.

Gisela Heffes has edited two collections of essays, one on the experience of displacement and translocation in the creative imagination of Spanish-American writers residing in the US (Poéticas de los (dis)locamientos, 2012), and another focused on the intersections between utopia and cities in Latin America (Utopías urbanas. Geopolítica del deseo en América latina, 2013). She was also the guest editor for the special issue of Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana on “Ecocrítica” (2014).

With Professor Jennifer French of Williams College she completed The Latin American Ecocultural Reader (2020), a critical anthology of primary sources that bring into focus the relationships between human societies and the more-than-human world in Latin America, from the earliest colonial period to the present. She has also finished with Professor Carolyn Fornoff of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign an edited volume, Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (2021), which aims to theorize the rich cinematic production coming out of Latin America that attends to the politics of environmental destruction, the unevenness of climate change consequences, and new ways of visualizing the world beyond the human. Dr. Heffes is currently working on a manuscript, tentatively entitled, Toxic Nature: Mutated Bodies and Altered Landscapes in Contemporary Southern Cone Narratives and Cinema.

In addition, Gisela Heffes is the co-founder and co-editor, with Uruguayan sociologist Eduardo Gudynas, of Wayra – saberes de otros modos sobre sociedad y naturaleza, a new journal dedicated to Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences that will assess the relationship between nature and society in Latin America; she is co-editor, with Lisa Blackmore, of the Peter Lang’s new Latin American Environmental Humanities Book Series; and with Ursula Heise, of the Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment series at Palgrave Macmillan. Dr. Heffes has served as Co-Diversity Officer at the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) for the 2017-2020 term.

Gisela Heffes is also an active fiction writer, having published the novels Ischia (2000), Praga (2001), and Ischia, Praga & Bruselas (2005); the collection of short stories, Glossa urbana (2012); a collection of poetic chronicles, Aldea Lounge (2014); and the novella, Sophie La Belle and the Miniature Cities; her novel Cocodrilos en la noche (2020), and the bilingual collection of poems, El cero móvil de su boca / The Mobile Zero of Its Mouth (translated by Grady C. Wray, 2020). She is the founder of the Digital Repository of Latin American Writings in the US (Fondren Library), an initiative that seeks to gather and record the voices of Spanish-American writers living in the United States, and co-founder, with Literal Publishing, of the (dis)locados series.