Paula Pontes García

Paula Pontes García is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale. She holds an M.A. in Contemporary Art History from Museo Reina Sofía, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, as well as a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her master’s thesis explored the representations of the Spanish Pyrenees, examining how contemporary art and visual culture can contribute to the construction of a non-sublime narrative of the mountain territory. Through this lens, she aims to generate affective imaginaries that resist extractivist practices and the logics of touristification. At Yale, Paula plans to expand this research by investigating the relationship between mountain literature and visual arts and examining the role of languages in the construction of the Pyrenean identities.

Keywords: practice-based research; political ecology; counter-archival practices; ruralities