About

Ph.D. New York University; MA University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; BA and BJ, University of Missouri-Columbia

Christine Martinez joins Bates as Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies for 2023-2024. Broadly, her research examines how communities and creators in the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas address challenges of enacting just and ecologically sustainable practices through literary, artistic, and filmic production and the generation of discursive spaces of transnational alliance. These actors—collectives, writers, artists, filmmakers, farmers—resist the continued colonization of life by neoliberal agents, seen, for example, in the expansion of agroindustry, speculative urbanization, and corporate-controlled energy projects. They also propose alternatives to capitalist and urban-centric values and narratives, often by engaging subsistence perspectives (small-scale agriculture) and communities marginalized or displaced by modern development (campesinxs [peasants], the elderly, migrants). I question what Iberian environmental and agroecological actors learn from engaging with movements in the Global South, particularly in challenging Eurocentric development paradigms, such as European Union agricultural policy. Christine is an active member of various scholarly initiatives working to promote critical ecopedagogical practices within Hispanic language and literature studies. She has also published various articles and book chapters and taught on the ecological thought of comics, a medium that originally sparked her interest in contemporary Iberian literature and environmental studies! From 2022–2023 she served as managing editor for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Selected publications:

“Futuros campesinos: La transición ecosocial, los movimientos rurales ibéricos y la reivindicación de la identidad campesina.” In Espacios y límites de la (in)justicia en la España contemporánea, edited by Mónica López Lerma. Granada, Editorial Comares, forthcoming 2023.

“Drawing Ecological Thought: Anthropomorphism and Satire as Critique of Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century Spanish Comic.” in Beyond Human: Decentering theAnthropocene in Spanish Ecocriticism, edited by Shanna Lino and Maryanne Leone, Toronto Iberic, 2023.

“Environmental Politics, Ecological Thought, and Spanish Comics.” co-authored with Jorge Catalá. In Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies. Ed. Luis I. Prádanos. Rochester, NY: Tamesis, 2023.

“Urban Ecology and Comics Journalism in Jorge Carrión and Sagar Forniés’ Barcelona: Los vagabundos de la chatarra (2015).” Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain. Eds. Matthew Marr and Samuel Amago. Toronto: U. of Toronto Press, 2019.

“The Affirmative Politics of Degrowth: Miguel Brieva’s graphic narrative Memorias de la Tierra.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 18:2, 2017.