On Thursday, April 19, 2018, Dr. Gisela Heffes, Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Rice University, will give a not-to-be-missed lecture on the topic of ecocriticism in the Argentine context. The talk is titled, “El nuevo paisaje rural argentino: contaminación y ecodeformidades contemporáneas” (“The New Rural Argentine Landscape: Contamination and Contemporary Ecodeformities”) and will be given in Spanish. The doors, however, are open to all members of the Tulane community, regardless of Spanish proficiency. The event will take place in in the Howard Tilton Library, room 602, from 5:00pm to 6:30pm, followed by a Q&A session and a light reception in the same space, to be concluded at 8:30pm.

Dr. Heffes comes to Tulane by special invitation from the graduate students of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, as part of the department’s traditional spring guest speaker series. The primary objectives of the event are to enrich the intellectual life of students and faculty in the aforementioned department and to facilitate interdisciplinary learning and exchange across departmental lines at the university.

Beyond ecocriticism, environmental studies, and discourses on nature, Dr. Heffes’ areas of research and expertise include Latin American literature, film and culture; theories of space and urban imaginaries Utopian studies and thought; fictional utopias; and Jewish literature and culture. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University (2007) and a Licenciatura en Letras from the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the Universidad de Buenos Aires (1997).