Marcela Romero Rivera

Marcela Romero Rivera (PhD. Cornell University, 2012) is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College. Her work explores the sensorial strategies deployed by contemporary Latin American aesthetics to work through the challenges of their political contexts. Particularly, she reads the transit of materiality from the realm of nature to history and politics in literature and visual arts from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.

Currently, she works on the local and global circuits of transit of images of the material manifestation of violence and their political significance in contemporary Mexico; this project engages the work of female Mexican artists like Nellie Campobello, Natalia Almada, Teresa Margolles, Guadalupe Nettel, and Tania Cardiani. The goal of the project is to describe and theorize how these artists mediate collective experiences of violence, climate change, and disaster by questioning the ecological and political preeminence of man as a species, but also as a gendered subject in their work.

She is also now embarking on a project for a critical recovery of the political legacy of anarchism, socialism, and communism that characterized the Republican front of the Spanish Civil War. Through an analysis of the conditions of preservation and survival of the actors and archives of the Spanish Republic during the war and later in exile, the purpose of the project is to shed light on the lasting political effects of acts of organized international solidarity, and specially on the role women played in the construction and preservation of these networks