Aaron Gabriel Montalvo

Professional Bio

Dr. Aaron Gabriel Montalvo is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the Pennsylvania State University, from which he recently graduated with a PhD in English and Visual Studies. His book project, Accounts of Exploitation and Stories of Sustainability: Narrating the Nature of Resources in the Modern American West, analyses representations of natural and cultural resources in literature and art to understand the way that narratives about resources shape relations between the human and nonhuman world.

Beyond this work, Aaron has published two articles. His first article concerns artist Joseph Highmore's painting series adapting Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. He argues 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. His 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.