Carlos Alonso Nugent is an Assistant Professor in both the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. In his research and teaching, he draws on and develops US literary and cultural studies, Latinx literary and cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and the environmental humanities.
Nugent is the author of Imagined Environments: The Making of the Borderlands, which is appearing in November 2026 with the American Crossroads Series at the University of California Press. Casting light across the US–Mexico borderlands, this book reveals the region’s “imagined environments”—the frameworks through which its human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. While these imagined environments can feel immersive and even immutable, Nugent explains how they have in fact emerged in everything from Apache pictographs to US and Mexican laws to novels, poems, paintings, and photographs. By showing how the larger imagined environments have shaped and been shaped by such cultural constituents, he revises accepted accounts of relational racialization: advancing from 1848 to the present, he demonstrates that whiteness has coevolved with western water infrastructures, that Latinidades have developed through divergent forms of land tenure, and that Native nations have thrived not only by staying in specific places but also by migrating across vast spaces. With such stories, Nugent complicates the environmental humanities: even as he argues that media have naturalized our use and abuse of the planet, he still explores how they have helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met.
While finishing his first book, Nugent is starting a second that is tentatively titled Nuestra América: A Literary History of the Anthropocene. Beyond the books, he has published articles in American Literature, American Literary History, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, Representations, and other venues; for this research, he has received American Literature’s Foerster Prize, the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize, and the American Studies Association’s Kolodny Prize, as well as fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library, and elsewhere. With Michelle N. Huang, he edited “Solidarity in Incommensurability: Ethnic Studies and the Environmental Humanities,” a “Forum” in American Quarterly.
Before beginning his academic career, Nugent taught at a high school in New York City and an elementary school in Meco, Spain. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He maintains a website with more information on his research, teaching, and collaborations.
Carlos Alonso Nugent is an Assistant Professor in both the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. In his research and teaching, he draws on and develops US literary and cultural studies, Latinx literary and cultural studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and the environmental humanities.
Nugent is the author of Imagined Environments: The Making of the Borderlands, which is appearing in November 2026 with the American Crossroads Series at the University of California Press. Casting light across the US–Mexico borderlands, this book reveals the region’s “imagined environments”—the frameworks through which its human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. While these imagined environments can feel immersive and even immutable, Nugent explains how they have in fact emerged in everything from Apache pictographs to US and Mexican laws to novels, poems, paintings, and photographs. By showing how the larger imagined environments have shaped and been shaped by such cultural constituents, he revises accepted accounts of relational racialization: advancing from 1848 to the present, he demonstrates that whiteness has coevolved with western water infrastructures, that Latinidades have developed through divergent forms of land tenure, and that Native nations have thrived not only by staying in specific places but also by migrating across vast spaces. With such stories, Nugent complicates the environmental humanities: even as he argues that media have naturalized our use and abuse of the planet, he still explores how they have helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met.
While finishing his first book, Nugent is starting a second that is tentatively titled Nuestra América: A Literary History of the Anthropocene. Beyond the books, he has published articles in American Literature, American Literary History, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Modernism/Modernity Print Plus, Representations, and other venues; for this research, he has received American Literature’s Foerster Prize, the American Literature Society’s 1921 Prize, and the American Studies Association’s Kolodny Prize, as well as fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, the Beinecke Library, and elsewhere. With Michelle N. Huang, he edited “Solidarity in Incommensurability: Ethnic Studies and the Environmental Humanities,” a “Forum” in American Quarterly.
Before beginning his academic career, Nugent taught at a high school in New York City and an elementary school in Meco, Spain. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona. He maintains a website with more information on his research, teaching, and collaborations.
