Nicolas Campisi

Nicolás Campisi studies the relationship between literature and catastrophe in contemporary Latin America. His first book, The Return of the Contemporary: The Latin American Novel in the End Times (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), examines how writers represent Latin America's neoliberal apocalypse brought about by ecological disaster, socioeconomic crisis, the lingering traumas of dictatorship, and the afterlives of slavery. The book explores the intersection between environmental humanities and the politics of postmemory in contemporary Latin America, showing how the region's neoliberal crisis prompted significant changes in how the novel as a form imagines a different future.

His second book project, tentatively titled Climatic Genres: Anthropocene Writing in Latin America, charts the emergence of new literary modes for representing the invisible and long-term violence of the climate crisis, focusing on issues such as mining, pesticide poisoning, and global pandemics. The book will theorize the emerging speculative genres with which Latin American writers are making sense of the Anthropocene, including the agrochemical gothic, the new weird, and geological horror.

Additionally, Professor Campisi has co-edited a volume entitled Imagining a New Natural History: Latin American Cultural Production in the Anthropocene, forthcoming with the University Press of Florida. The book explores how Latin American writers, artists, and critics have turned to the discourses and practices of natural history—including museums, cabinets of curiosities, and botanical gardens—as a way of reckoning with the realities of climate change and the Anthropocene.

At Georgetown, he regularly offers courses on climate art and literature, the literature of ecohorror, and post-dictatorship cultural production. His latest courses include "Patagonia: Culture at the End of the World" and "Extractivism in Latin American Culture."