Diana Aldrete is an Assistant Professor of Language and Culture Studies and Human Rights. Her research, pedagogy, and artistic production, interrogates the intersections of contemporary Mexican/Latin American/Latinx literary, film and cultural studies, Mexico-U.S. border studies, feminist and queer theory, environmental humanities, and Human Rights studies. She is currently working on her first monographic book project tentatively titled Between Land and Death: Women Writing for Justice in Mexico, which examines how literary production, primarily by contemporary Mexican women writers, have become part of the political dialectic on anti-feminicidal violence as they question notions of justice, and place literature in conversation with activism.  

She is also an abstract visual artist and writer, who often infuses literary, musical, and cultural references in her visual art and writing. She has published poetry and short fiction, exhibited her visual art in several venues in Connecticut, and had her first solo exhibit Invisible Suffering, at Charter Oak Cultural Center and Austin Arts Center's Garmany Hall in the spring 2022. The art project Invisible Suffering was supported by the Free Center’s "Independent Artist Fund," which sponsored 36 projects by (BIPOC) artists in Hartford. Inspired by activist and water protector Josephine Mandamin, her second art project Ech.o Locations, is a study on the ecologies of the Great Lakes, and the relationships between the contact zones of water, land, and its inhabitants (human and non-human). Ech.o Locations is an ecofeminist project that focuses on sound and visual manifestations of several coast lines and will be part of a larger series called EcoMaterialities, where an ecocritical art installation invites viewers to consider how bodies experience ecological disasters. 

Professor Aldrete has had experience teaching at different levels of higher education, such as community college, small liberal arts college, and research university. This experience has helped her develop an interdisciplinary methodology in her pedagogy.

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