In this new Q&A series, we speak with faculty to learn more about the work they do, as well as what they love about engaging with College students. This month we chat with Carlos Alonso Nugent, an assistant professor in both the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. In addition to Lit Hum, Nugent is teaching the undergraduate course “Introduction to Latinx Literature and Culture” this semester; he will be a guest at the Undergraduate Community Initiative’s faculty-student engagement series “Fac’ to Table” in John Jay Dining Hall on Thursday, March 26.
You’ve been at Columbia since 2023; what was the path that brought you to Morningside? And how did you get interested in your area of study?
Before coming to Columbia, I was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt; and before that, a postdoc at Stanford. But my academic career really started as a Ph.D. student at Yale, where I was based in the English department but also was the first recipient of a graduate certificate in environmental humanities. This is an interdisciplinary field that’s emerged through recognition that problems like climate change, biodiversity loss and natural disasters transcend the tools that any one discipline can bring to bear on them — a recognition that to understand the causes, consequences and trajectories of environmental problems, we need to bring together methods from multiple disciplines.
While I was in grad school, my work started focusing on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, tracking the changing relationships between Indigenous Peoples, Anglo-American settlers, and above all the communities we now call Latinx. Having grown up in Tucson, one of the things that struck me about the accounts I’d read of this region is that they tended to emphasize these all-too-human identities while not thinking about how they shaped and were shaped by more-than-human entities like plants and animals and water, especially in the desert. So my interests in Latinx literature and culture converged with the growing field of environmental humanities, to make that a particular point of emphasis in my research.
What have you gained from your experience working with College undergrads?
I’ve been delighted to find that while being just as intelligent, ambitious and resourceful as their peers at the other places I’ve taught, Columbia students are actually quite different.
I think that part of this difference has to do with being in New York City — choosing to live in a place where there are people from all over the world, choosing to live in a place that doesn’t just offer the so-called “classic” college experience, but rather a much wider range of experiences. And I think at least in the case of the College, an equally important difference is the fact that these smart young people are choosing to go somewhere where they take several yearlong classes in the humanities. One thing I like about teaching in the Core Curriculum — and that I think students like about the Core — is that we’re engaging in this practice of close reading and communal seminar-style knowledge production that’s existed for thousands of years, and that seems likely to last longer still.
What’s something new or innovative that you’re doing as part of your teaching this year?
Amid the rise of generative artificial intelligence, I’ve been reluctant to use it as a scholar and teacher in ethnic studies, because it strikes me that predictive text generation might be an even more efficient way of reproducing ethnic and racial stereotypes.
That said, I thought it might be important for me to understand this new development, and I’ve recently tried several things that felt quite useful. On the one hand, I’ve asked generative AI to answer questions about texts that I’m reading with my students. Sometimes the answers are demonstrably wrong, as when it hallucinates something. Other times it has more general limitations for interpreting literature, which it certainly doesn’t do in any original way. Sharing the results of these experiments with my students, as I have on a few occasions, has helped them appreciate the value of our collective thinking.
I have also asked generative AI to create stereotypes that I then analyze with my students. For example, in my intro class, in a discussion about gender and sexuality, I asked it to create the image of a “Latin lover,” a stereotype that still thrives. And it was impactful for my students to unpack how that figure looked — about the fact that it showed a relatively light-skinned, relatively straight-haired Latino when many Latinos are Black, or Indigenous, or otherwise different from this supposedly “desirable” norm. It was useful for students to see how generative AI can create a composite of stereotypes that we might then use as a base for our critical analysis.
What’s something a new student would find exciting about your class?
In teaching Latinx studies in particular, and ethnic studies more broadly, I think students are often thrilled to find texts, images or other media produced by people who are similar to them or their families, when those objects of study have frequently been excluded from traditional curricula. At the same time, I think that this excitement of feeling represented — of feeling a connection with somebody who’s speaking to experiences they’ve had but have never been able to discuss in formal education settings — shifts as time goes on, becoming keen awareness of the extent to which all of our identities are constructed and are constantly up for contestation and redefinition.
So while students are initially excited simply by the experience of engaging with Latinx literature and culture, they can ultimately use that literature and culture as a tool to understand the forces of colonization and racialization that have made these identities in the first place, and that that we might imagine ways of unmaking them.