Rate My Professor Azucena Castro

Azucena Castro is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Rice University, specializing in Literature. She earned her PhD from Stockholm University in 2020. Prior to her current position, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Faculty of Science, Stockholm University. She also held postdoctoral positions in Latin American and Caribbean cultures at Stanford University and in human geography at the Institute of Geography, University of Buenos Aires. Castro's scholarly work centers on 20th and 21st century Latin American cultural products, analyzed through the lenses of climate and energy justice, multispecies resistance, and anti-extractivist critique in artivist scenes across South America, particularly the Southern Cone and Brazil. Her research interests encompass South American literatures and cultures, multispecies storytelling in transnational perspective, climate justice and political ecology in the Global South, and critical sustainability and environmental humanities.

Castro authored Posnaturalezas poéticas: Pensamiento ecológico y políticas de la extrañeza en la poesía latinoamericana contemporánea, published by De Gruyter in the SubAtlantic series (2025), marking the first in-depth transnational study of Latin American environmental poetry in the Environmental Humanities field. She edited Futuros multiespecie: Prácticas vinculantes para un planeta en emergencia (Bartlebooth, 2023) and co-edited Contesting the Unthinkable from the Margins: Cultural Responses to Climate Change and Environmental Catastrophes in Latin America and the Caribbean with Gianfranco Selgas and Ken Benson (University Press of Florida, forthcoming Spring 2026). Among her key publications are 'Reclaiming Energy Flows: Energy GeoHumanities and the Socio-Ecologies of Rivers in Latin American Hydro-Modernities' with Verónica Hollman (Geohumanities, 2024), 'Equity and Justice Should Underpin the Discourse on Tipping Points' (Earth System Dynamics, 2024), and 'Energy Sovereignty Storytelling: Art Practices, Community-led Transitions, and Territorial Futures in Latin America' (Tapuya, 2024). She has guest-edited special issues including 'GeoSemantics. Inhuman Becomings and Earthly Memories in the Global South' with Estefanía Bournot (ASAP/J, 2023). Currently, Castro is finishing a book manuscript on decolonizing invasion ecologies in South American art and literature amid chemical colonialism, funded by the Swedish Research Council, and developing a project on drought at the nexus of climate change studies and anti-colonial extractivist critique. She delivered a plenary keynote on multispecies resistance at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and co-led workshops on posthuman methods.