Santiago Acosta is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University. He works on modern and contemporary Latin American literature and visual arts, with a focus on cultural responses to extractivism, petroleum economies, and environmental crisis. His research combines approaches from cultural studies, political economy, and environmental theory.
His book manuscript, We Are Like Oil: An Ecology of the Venezuelan Culture Boom, explores how literature and the visual arts interacted with the environmental transformations of the 1970s oil boom in Venezuela. He is also co-editor of the volume Ecopoéticas y políticas ecológicas desde Abya Yala (under contract at Brill). From 2021 to 2023, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at SUNY Old Westbury, where he helped launch the college’s Environmental Studies program. At Yale, Acosta is a member of the Environmental Humanities Steering Committee, a Whitney Humanities Center Fellow, and serves on the faculty board at The Creative Forum.
Acosta is also an award-winning poet. His collection El próximo desierto (The Coming Desert) won the José Emilio Pacheco Literature Prize “City and Nature,” awarded by the Guadalajara International Book Fair and Guadalajara’s Museum of Environmental Sciences. He has received support from the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program and was an invited poet at the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP26. While in Caracas, he co-founded the poetry journal El Salmón, which won a National Book Award. His selected poems appeared in 2024 with Visor Libros under the title La desesperanza (Hopelessness).
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