Sarah María Medina Pérez, PhD
Sarah María Medina Pérez, PhD, is a scholar of comparative literature whose work centers on avant‑garde poetics, ecopoetics, environmental humanities, and translation studies. Her research examines transnational modernisms in the Americas through ecofeminist and queer ecological frameworks, anti‑colonial translation theory, and the relationship between experimental poetics and environmental media. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Comparative History of Ideas from the University of Washington in Seattle, her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and her PhD in Comparative Literature (International Writers Track) from Washington University in St. Louis.
Her monograph, Volcanoes, Islands, and Cities: Ecopoetics of the Transnational Avant‑Gardes in the Americas, 1910–1950s, traces ecological imaginaries across Caribbean and Mexican modernist networks, reclaiming ecological thought within texts that reframe the relationship between body and landscape. The project examines writers such as Nahui Olin, Alice Rahon, and Luz Jiménez, each of whom develops an ecological imaginary grounded in the landscape of Mexico City and centered on the reclamation of the feminized body. Her research also extends to the Caribbean through the poetics of Jane “Jeanne” Nardal and Jeanne Mégnen, and to related modernist figures including Anita Brenner, Tina Modotti, Leonora Carrington, Lola Álvarez Bravo, and Gertrude Duby Blom.
Medina Pérez’s translation project focuses on the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio’s collection The Moth‑Woman (La Falena). Her own poetry and translations appear in Poetry Magazine, Asymptote, Prelude, Black Warrior Review, Poetry Northwest, and in the anthologies Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color and Queer Nature. She is the recipient of the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, the Divided City Graduate Research Fellowship, and the Born‑Digital Poetry Fellowship in the Modern Literature Collection at Washington University in St. Louis.
Her teaching experience includes serving as instructor of record for Introduction to Poetry in the English Department, as well as assistant instructor roles in World‑Wide Translation: Language, Culture, Technology (Global Studies and Comparative Literature), Literary Theory (English), and World Literature. She has also co‑taught the Merle Kling Undergraduate Honors Seminar, supporting students in interdisciplinary humanities research and public‑facing scholarship; she also co‑taught World Literature.
Her archival and curatorial work includes the exhibit Wherein I Am: Highlights from the Aaron Coleman Papers in the Julian Edison Department of Special Collections, highlighting Coleman’s poetry and his study of translation and the African Diaspora in the Americas. She was awarded the Born‑Digital Poetry Fellowship, focused on digital preservation and the future of literary archives, and curated Some Days Everything Is a Machine: The Poetic Practices of Mary Jo Bang, also in Special Collections.
The Divided City Graduate Research Fellowship supported her work on the body poetics of Nahui Olin and Anita Brenner in Mexico City’s avant‑garde. The Global Futures grant supported her research on avant‑garde ecopoetic networks in San Cristóbal de las Casas, México, examining primitivism, embodiment, affect, and ecocriticism in the photography of environmentalist Gertrude Duby Blom.
As a participant in the Global Humanities Working Group, Medina Pérez researches early comparatism in Mexico and its global networks, focusing on Enrique de Olavarría y Ferrari (1844–1919), a central figure in Mexican literary circles who wrote extensively on Mexican history and edited influential literary journals in Mexico City.