Santiago Acosta

Santiago Acosta joins Yale as Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Cultures from Columbia University. Acosta’s research centers on modern and contemporary Latin American cultural production, which he examines through the lenses of critical theory, political economy, and environmental studies. His book project, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, 1973-1983, explores the relationship between the visual arts, cultural institutions, and state-led ecological transformations in Venezuela during the 1970s oil boom. He co-organized the special issue of Mediations titled “Environmental Theory in Latin America” (forthcoming in 2023) and is the co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas contemporáneas desde el Sur (under contract at BRILL). In 2021-23, he was the PRODiG Fellow at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, where he helped launch the institution’s new Environmental Studies degree. Acosta’s fourth and most recent poetry collection, El próximo desierto (The Coming Desert), won the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “Ciudad y Naturaleza,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair (FIL) and the Museum of Environmental Sciences of Guadalajara University. Acosta’s poetry has also received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, and he was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow. While in Caracas, he was a founding editor of the poetry journal El Salmón (National Book Award, 2010).