KINGSTON, RI – April 22 – Hilda Lloréns, professor of anthropology, gender & women studies, and marine affairs has been appointed as the 2025-2026 Cornille Distinguished Scholar at Wellesley College. Lloréns will begin her residency in the fall of 2025 at the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities and will continue through the academic year to complete her latest book.
“I feel deeply honored and privileged to be selected as the 2025-26 Mary L. Cornille Distinguished Visiting Professor,” said Lloréns. “I am excited for the opportunity to be in a community with excellent faculty and learners there and for the focused time to work on my current book manuscript.”
The book Nature Practices: The Latinx Outdoors at the End of Nature combines ethnographic fieldwork with analysis of cultural production to document the relationship of Latinx populations with nature and the outdoors in the United States. Subjects of study will include uses, perceptions, and representations of the outdoors, as well as findings about equity, access, the “nature gap,” nature deprivation, and the “nature deficit disorder” among Latinx populations.
Nature deprivation refers to having little to no access to safe green environments. These persistent inequities are the result of the systemic racism people of color in the U.S. historically experience in virtually all areas of life. In this project, “nature” refers to both a place outside humans and one that includes humans. It also refers to a set of conceptual ideas humans have created about the world and how we fit it.
“As a cultural anthropologist and environmental humanities scholar, I think this residency attests to URI’s support for the inter- and transdisciplinary research and teaching that I do. Additionally, it highlights that Wellesley values and nurtures the justice/advocacy-oriented, and inclusive scholarship that I produce,” said Lloréns
Lloréns’ research, writing, and teaching focus on race, gender, ecology & environment, and culture & power in the Americas. Prof. Lloréns has written about these topics in academic journals and books, in popular readership online, and in print magazines. Her research is centrally concerned with critiquing structural inequalities and dismantling notions of power that have been taken for granted.
She is committed to anti-racist, decolonial, inclusive thought, research, and pedagogy. At URI, she teaches Gender & Culture, Critical Island Studies, Decolonial Ecologies, and Anthropological Theory & Practice, among others.