Ana Laura Boeno Malmaceda
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (Portuguese and French), pursuing a certificate in Latin American Studies and a secondary field in Critical Media Practice. My research and teaching bring together creative writing, Indigenous Studies, Latin American literature, STS, cultural studies, and multimodal anthropology. Across these fields, I investigate nature as a historical discourse entangled with extraction, gender, and racial difference, reading nineteenth-century and contemporary Indigenous scientific knowledge through its practices, moral economies, and visual cultures. Moving from naturalists to contemporary Latin American Indigenous science, my work reflects on what I theorize as epistemic reforestation: how Indigenous peoples occupy and regrow science from damaging practices and archives through the flourishing of new sensibilities and transformative methods inside institutions.
My dissertation, On the Origins of Ecocide: Colonial Cosmologies and the Thayer Expedition to Brazil (1865–66), examines the intellectual, material, and affective legacies of a North American voyage led by Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-73) to Brazil at the end of the Civil War (1861-65). With support from the U.S. and Brazilian administrations, Agassiz aimed to disprove Darwin's theory of natural selection and prove his own origin story: one in which God had crafted all species, human and non-human, for specific functions and territories. Although scientifically unsuccessful, he helped open the Brazilian Amazon to foreign capital, a goal achieved a few months after his departure. Together with geological surveys and thousands of fish specimens in ethanol jars, he also photographed Indigenous and Black subjects in a human laboratory, leaving a legacy of disturbing photos and racial ideas behind. Through archival research and fieldwork, I ask the reader and myself how to inherit these archives while studying documents from key figures connected to the expedition, including young philosopher William James (1842–1910), Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II (1825–1891), deputy Tavares Bastos (1839–1875), and Consul General Watson Webb (1802–1884).
Art is one of my most cherished and fulfilling practices. For my secondary field in Critical Media Practice, I have developed a series of media pieces, relational art protocols, and installations, including the sound piece Quinobequin, a sound ethnography of Charles River, MA. I have two media projects in post-production: the visual ethnography VEROPA, an immersive film about daily life at Ver-o-Peso, Latin America's largest open market, and Dig the ground, a short movie essay about exile and inheritance through archival footage and travel writing. Since moving to Paris in 2023, I have been shooting Okara, a film for an interdisciplinary project between the Musée de l'Homme, USP, the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, and Tupinambá students, guided by artist and researcher Glicéria Tupinambá (Museu Nacional). Together with her, I am producing a film about the Tupinambá presence in France.
My research draws on a decade of fieldwork inside forests, laboratories, museums, and Indigenous territories. I have developed my research at institutions such as Science Po's médialab, Collège de France, and the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and have presented my research at Harvard’s Peabody Museum, The New School, and the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM) in Manaus. My next project, a study of what I theorize as epistemic reforestation, explores transformative science-making, interdisciplinary scholarship, and co-creation with Indigenous scholars and artists.
Contact: malmaceda.aana@gmail.com