Nuria Sánchez Matías

Nuria Angélica Sánchez Matías is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. She holds a B.A. in Hispanic Language and Literatures from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and a M.A. in Art Studies from Universidad Iberoamericana, both earned summa cum laude with theses on skepticism and ecocriticism respectively.

Her main research sits in the intersection of environmental humanities and archaeologies of value, straddling words and images through intermediality. She conceives of poetry as a way of thinking with heuristic and affective devices. Through ecocriticism, she approaches how artists and writers thread the human with the more-than-human, particularly by means of fabulation and speculation.

Trained as a linguist, literary scholar and art historian, Nuria is mainly interested in Mexico and South America in the 20th and 21st centuries, intermittently exploring other regions such as Caucasia, the Pacific Islands, and West Africa.

A passionate of archival research, she explores material culture and design, the politics of graphic arts and visual culture, and the conceptual history of political thought. She has also conducted research on sound and hapticity, post-growth economies in the art market, and intersemiotic translation. A firm believer of creative academic writing, Nuria aims to expand institutional language and practices through textual experiments such as curatorial poems and participatory conference formats.

Born in Mexico City and raised in Oaxaca Valley, she joined Yale as a Fulbright Foreign Student, and she was a 1st year Graduate Fellow in the Environmental Humanities (Whitney Humanities Center) and in Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM). Before starting her doctoral studies, she worked for more than three years as an educator of language, literature and writing, in middle school, high school and undergraduate levels.

Nuria has published a peer reviewed article on the ecoacustics of wood in video art, and her reviews have appeared in ISLE, ASAP/J, and Ciencias y Humanidades.