Speculative Futurity: How Latinx Literature and Film Teach us to Hope in Dark Times, Oct. 17

David J. Vázquez is Professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies and Program Director of Latina/o/x Studies at American University in Washington, DC. He is the author of "Decolonial Environmentalisms: Climate Justice and Speculative Futurity in Latinx Cultural Production" (Texas, 2025) and "Triangulations: Narrative Strategies for Navigating Latino Identity" (Minnesota, 2011). He is also co-editor of "Latinx Environmentalisms: Place, Justice, and the Decolonial" (Temple, 2019), which won the 2022 Modern Language Association Prize for an Edited Volume. His current projects include a new monograph, tentatively titled “Days of Futures Past: Latinx Science Fiction and Speculative Futurity,” and several collaborative articles and special journal issues. With Sarah D. Wald, Priscilla Solis Ybarra, Gabriela Enriqueta Nuñez, and Moe Gamez, he is the co-founder of the Tierra Viva Collaborative, a group of humanities practitioners working across multiple institutions and producing numerous forms of peer-reviewed scholarship and public humanities work. In 2024/25, Vázquez was the William C. and Ida Friday Fellow at the National Humanities Center.