José LondoñoPostdoctoral Fellow in Spanish

José Alejandro Londoño Pabón is a Latin American environmental humanities scholar and educator. His research ranges from modern travel literature to contemporary cultural production around commodities and extractivism, including petroleum, bananas, rubber, and water, as well as artistic practices shaped by social movements and activism. His work engages with the infrastructure turn, urbanization, memory, environmental history, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.

Following his dissertation, Desencanto en el Río Magdalena: producción cultural y crisis socioambiental en tiempos de “progreso”, he will be developing a book manuscript on cultural production along the Magdalena River. He will be working toward publishing an article based on his dissertation chapter on Carolina Caycedo, which includes an interview with the artist, and exploring how thinking with rivers might open new theoretical approaches to memory and the archive in cultural studies.

This year, you will find him at many of the activities organized by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and perhaps you will be one of his students. Outside the classroom, you might see him biking around Atlanta, taking MARTA, going to film clubs and art exhibitions, talking about human rights, about problems in Atlanta, about how to cook something, or sharing information about ways to support people at risk of deportation and people who are incarcerated. He is always happy to talk about Colombia or about politics and cultural life across Latin America.