As part of the Higgins Faculty Series at Clark University, María Acosta Cruz will deliver a talk based on her forthcoming book, Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture (Palgrave MacMillan 2025).
This lecture takes place on Wednesday, April 9, at 1:30pm (EST) at Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons, Clark University (36 Maywood Street, Worcester, Massachusetts). Admission is free and open to the public, and lunch will be provided. Guests are encouraged to arrive at 1:15pm for refreshments. To register for the webinar, see the link below.
Description: Join us as Clark University faculty member María Acosta Cruz (Language, Literature, and Culture) discusses her new book, Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture. In it, she explores Puerto Rico’s national culture through a complex web of references to the disasters that the nation has suffered and to how the environment has been portrayed. Sometimes Puerto Rican history, literature and arts highlight the drama of hurricanes and earthquakes. But often, the classics read in universities and gazed at in museums depict an Edenic garden of eternal spring. Since cultural depictions of the environment are never innocent and always have socio-political motivations, Acosta Cruz’s ecocritical project explores Puerto Rico through its unique convergences of calamities: cyclonic location and ecological instability, as well as continuous colonialism.
Register for the webinar at https://clarku.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Xm0Mp5dfQy-2OEmEcvmZFA#/registration
[Image above: “Untitled,” from the series Paradisus Project No. 2, by Carlos Ruiz-Valarino (Puerto Rico). Many thanks to the artist for sharing this photograph.] For more on the artist, see https://www.mapr.org/es/museo/cede/artista/ruiz-valarino-carlos and https://ruizvalarino.wordpress.com/. For more on Paradisus Project No. 2, see https://saksglobalartcollection.com/collection/carlos-ruiz-valarino-paradisus-project-no-2/
As part of the Higgins Faculty Series at Clark University, María Acosta Cruz will deliver a talk based on her forthcoming book, Disaster Nation: An Ecocritical Study of Puerto Rican Culture (Palgrave MacMillan 2025). This lecture takes place on Wednesday, April 9, at 1:30pm (EST) at Higgins Lounge at Dana Commons, Clark University (36 Maywood