Aaron Gabriel Montalvo

Professional Bio

I am a fourth year PhD student enrolled in the Visual Studies dual-title program. My work focuses on the 20th and 21st century literature and art of the American West in an environmental context. My dissertation project analyses representations of natural resources in various media to understand the way that narratives about resources shape relations between the human and nonhuman world.

Beyond my dissertation work, I have published two articles. My first article concerns artist Joseph Highmore's painting series adapting Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. I argue that Highmore's work uses Pamela to intercede in 18th century debates concerning spectatorship and the role of art in moral education. That article was published in Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture. My second article examines depictions of environmental deformation in recent speculative fictions and asserts that these "terradeformations" critique Western attempts to control the earth. That article was published in the SFRA Review.