ABOUT






Valeria Meiller is a writer and scholar specializing in the environmental humanities in the Latin American region. She is recognized for her experience in conceiving original and dynamic projects and ideas for publications, exhibitions, conferences, and biennials. Her research and writing analyze pressing ecological topics in literature and the arts from the perspective of environmental theory. Her work has been published in journals, newspapers, and magazines worldwide. She works and lives between Texas and New York.

Valeria is an Assistant Professor of Social and Environmental Challenges in Latin America at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is currently working on her first scholarly book Territorios Necropolíticos: mataderos y políticas de la muerte en la cuenca ganadera del Plata. The project offers a biopolitical analysis of literary and visual materials from the cattle raising region integrated by Southern Brasil, Uruguay, and Argentina through an expanded notion of the slaughterhouse. The monograph proposes the term “necropolitical territory” to broaden the scope of the slaughterhouse as a modern architectural typology, and reframe it as an ever evolving biopolitical arena where to historicize the politics of life and death operating within the cultural production of the region; particularly in times of political upheaval starting from the postcolonial era to the present.

She is currently co-editing Ruge el Bosque: ecopoesía de las Américas, a series of five multilingual literary anthologies that bring together poets from diverse communities on the basis of a mutual concern for the environment. Organized by climate regions, this project is intended as an urgent reflection on the disappearance of natural, cultural, and linguistic diversity amidst a global climate crisis. The first forthcoming volume, Ruge el Bosque: Ecopoesia del Cono Sur, includes ecopoetry written in lenguas originarias of the Southern Cone, along with poetry written in Spanish and Portuñol (Caleta Olivia, 2023). This project has been supported by a Ford-LASA Special Projects Grant and a UTSA Internal Research Award.

Valeria is the author of four ecopoetry books in Spanish, including El libro de los caballitos as well as El mes raro, forthcoming in English in 2024. She has also written El Recreo and Tilos, a book published by La Propia Cartonera, an Uruguayan collective project where authors created cardboard handcrafted books as a response to the 2000s Latin American Crisis. Between 2012-2017, she was the editor of the Argentine-based independent publishing house Dakota Editora, a project she co-founded to create a dialogue among contemporary authors in the Americas. She has also translated several book-length projects from English into Spanish.

As an expert in her field, Valeria has been invited to participate in various international symposia, conferences, and events on the environment in Latin America and the world. Valeria holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from Georgetown University, with a Master from Georgetown and a Licenciatura en Letras from the University of Buenos Aires.