ICM Lecture Series

Fall 2026

ICM is delighted to host Carolyn Fornoff for a lecture about her current research.  Details to follow.

Bio

Carolyn Fornoff is Associate Professor of Latin American Stuin the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University.   

Carolyn Fornoff’s research explores cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico and Central America. It asks how art helps narrate and make sense of problems like climate change that are temporally expansive and often difficult to see with the naked eye. She is the coeditor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021).

Fornoff’s first book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), traces how contemporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico have shifted away from art’s evidentiary function (its ability to prove environmental crisis) and toward more subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty that grapple with how the world could be imagined otherwise. It was awarded the 2025 LASA Mexico Forum Best Book in the Humanities Prize and an honorable mention for the 2025 LASA Environment Best Book Prize. 

Prior to joining Cornell, Fornoff was a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She grew up in Austin, Texas. She serves on the Hispanic Review and ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment) advisory boards, and recently cochaired the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. At Cornell, she is a member of the Humanities Council, the Environment and Sustainability curriculum committee, and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies steering committee.