ICM Lecture Series
Fall 2026
CAROLYN FORNOFF (Associate Professor of Latin American Studies, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University)
“Agro-Toxic Horror? Agro-Toxic Farce!”
Monday, September 28, 2026
Goldwin Smith Hall, G22 | 4:45p.m. – 6:15pm.
Free and open to the public
Abstract
The unregulated use of pesticides in Latin America has long been linked with health risks for farmworkers and agricultural communities. Since the mid-twentieth century, Latin American and Latinx authors, artists, and filmmakers have mobilized a variety of representational techniques to draw attention to this environmental injustice. Yet the mandate to critique capitalism’s debilitating impact intersects uneasily with the representation of disability. Because toxicity is invisible to the naked eye, to render it legible, writers and artists have often turned to the human body as both sign and symptom. But crafting the disabled body as a stand-in for capitalist harm runs the risk of reducing disability to damage. This talk explores the affordances and limits of genre—specifically horror and comedy—when it comes to life in agro-toxic aftermath.
Bio
Carolyn Fornoff is Associate Professor of Latin American Stuin the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University.
Carolyn Fornoff’s research explores cultural responses to environmental crisis in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico and Central America. It asks how art helps narrate and make sense of problems like climate change that are temporally expansive and often difficult to see with the naked eye. She is the coeditor of two volumes in the environmental humanities: Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2021).
Fornoff’s first book, Subjunctive Aesthetics: Mexican Cultural Production in the Era of Climate Change (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), traces how contemporary filmmakers and writers in Mexico have shifted away from art’s evidentiary function (its ability to prove environmental crisis) and toward more subjunctive registers of hypothesis and uncertainty that grapple with how the world could be imagined otherwise. It was awarded the 2025 LASA Mexico Forum Best Book in the Humanities Prize and an honorable mention for the 2025 LASA Environment Best Book Prize.
