Manuela Luengas Solano

Manuela Luengas Solano is a Latin American cultural studies scholar whose areas of expertise include environmental humanities, contemporary art and media, and cultural anthropology. Her current book project, River Archives: Sedimentation, Fluidity, and Futurity in Latin American Literature, Film and Art, brings together a wide-ranging corpus of film, travel writing, cartography, literature, and installation art, examining the role of rivers in Latin America’s modern history. Concretely, she argues that rivers are both archives and actors for communities and artists alike; that is, they are conceived as meaningful entities holding traces of the past, while being active mediators of human and more-than-human relations. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this research offers a novel understanding of the region’s hydro-social territories, foregrounding rivers’ centrality in questions regarding political violence, race, and post-colonial extractive cycles. Manuela holds a PhD in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University, an MA in Literary Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and a BA in Anthropology from Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Contracorriente, Crisol, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and World Literature Today. A book on her previous research on twentieth-century print culture in Colombia has been published by Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico Press in 2025.