Valeria Meiller

Valeria Meiller is Assistant Professor at the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a core faculty member of the Native and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Stony Brook University. Her research lies at the intersection of Indigenous studies and the environmental humanities with an emphasis in plurilingual poetry and the visual arts.  She is currently working towards two book projects: Necroterritories. Slaughterhouses and the Politics of Death and In Defense of the Land. Biodiversity and Linguistic Diversity in 21st Century Poetry of Abiayala. 

Necroterritories evaluate the spatial configuration of slaughtering sites in Argentina throughout the 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century. The book argues that Argentina’s early cultural deployment of animal slaughter such as Esteban Echeverria’s nouvelle El matadero shaped a regionally specific understanding of slaughtering sites across literature, architecture, and the visual arts. This specificity lies in framing such sites not as infrastructure but as broader territories where life, both human and nonhuman, has been historically negotiated through both politics and aesthetics. As part of the research leading to this book, Valeria co-created the online exhibition Matadero Modelo  and the short documentary The Case of Meat, originally commissioned by the 2020 Istanbul Design Biennial and recipient of a 2022 LASA Merit Award in Film.

In Defense of the Land focuses on 21st-century plurilingual poetry as a site of environmental and cultural preservation for Indigenous communities in the midst of the current environmental crisis. This project draws from Ruge el bosque, a transnational and intercultural project about the role of poetry in contemporary Abiayala/Afro/Latin/America where Valeria officiates as the director. So far, this project was the recipient of a 2021 Ford-LASA Special Projects Award, a 2021 UTSA Seed Grant, a 2023 NCLAS Best Digital Project Award and a 2024 UTSA Creative Production Award. As part of Ruge el Bosque, Valeria has co-edited two plurilingual anthologies Ruge el bosque. Volumen 1. Ecopoesía del Cono Sur (Caleta Olivia, 2023) and Ruge el bosque. Volumen 2. Ecopoesía de Mesoamérica (Caleta Olivia, 2024), and is currently preparing Ruge el bosque. Volumen 3. Ecopoesía de la Amazonía (Caleta Olivia, 2026). This project also includes a podcast, Ecoteca, that expands the scope of the anthologies by accounting for poetry’s role as part of language revitalization projects and environmental activism.

Valeria is also co-editor of the forthcoming edited volume Unpredictable Architectures. The Aesthetics and Politics of Gardening in Latin America (Brill, 2026) and the forthcoming special issue Still Lives. The Inhuman in Latin American Culture (Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2026). Her work has appeared in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), Hispanica Moderna, and other venues.