Santiago Acosta specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, which he examines through the lenses of cultural studies, political economy, and environmental theory. His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental shifts of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is also the co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde el Sur, currently under contract at Brill Academic Publishers. In 2021-23, he was the PRODiG Fellow at the State University of New York in Old Westbury, where he helped launch the institution’s new Environmental Studies degree.
Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His fourth and most recent collection, El próximo desierto (The Coming Desert), earned him the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences of the University of Guadalajara. He has received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow. While in Caracas, he co-founded the poetry journal El Salmón, which won a National Book Award in 2010.
Areas of interest: 20th-21st Century Latin America; Literature and Visual Cultures; Environmental Humanities; Energy Humanities; World-Ecology; Eco-Marxism; Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics; Extractivism; Climate Justice; Cultural Policy and Institutions; Creative Writing.
Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University (2020)
Website: http://santiagoacosta.org