DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

María Palacio's research and teaching interests include Latin American literary and cultural studies, testimonial and memory studies, Colombian and Latin American history, cultural geography, digital humanities, and Spanish as second language.

Her current book project, Paz con la naturaleza: La naturaleza como víctima y testigo enlas narrativas testimoniales del posacuerdo en Colombia, builds directly on her dissertation research and further develops its central concern with testimonial narratives of the Colombian armed conflict. The book will examine how, in contemporary testimonial narratives, non-human subjects such as rivers, forests, and ecosystems emerge as victims and witnesses of the armed conflict, expanding testimonial practices into a more-than-human endeavor and positioning territories as active participants in Colombia’s memory-making and peace-building processes. Engaging with memory studies, cultural geography, history, ecocriticism, and ontological pluralism, her research traces a recent trend in Colombia’s memory work that imagines spaces of reconciliation through nature while simultaneously confronting the cycles of violence that render peace fragile and incomplete. Supported by the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program at Northwestern University, and the Pembroke Center at Brown University, her research challenges the dominant temporal focus of testimonial and memory studies and repositions Colombian memory work within Latin American and global debates on post-conflict reparation.

Her article “Hacia una redefinición de los territorios testimoniales: la naturaleza como testigo en Cuando los pájaros no cantaban, de la Comisión de la Verdad” was publishedin Visitas al Patio. Her article “Si el río hablara (2021) [If the River Could Speak:] Ecologies of Memory, Truth, and Reconciliation of the Colombian Post-Conflict” is forthcoming in Women Studies Quarterly. During the 2025–2026 academic year, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University’s Pembroke Center. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University, an MA in Digital Humanities from Loyola University Chicago, and a BA in Literature from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia).