Dr. Celina Osuna

Celina Osuna is a writer, scholar, and artist. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at El Paso, and her research, with an emphasis on Indigenous and Latinx Environmentalisms, explores aesthetics of desert places in literature, art, and film and their impacts on cultural imagination and geopolitical relationships to land.​

Her monograph, Desert Distortion, is forthcoming from Texas Tech University Press in 2025. The book looks at the diversity, histories, and possibilities of arid environments of the US-Mexico Borderlands in order to dispel harmful representations of deserts as barren or empty. Desert distortion is offered as a generative methodology that performs and showcases abundance as a counter to lack. It is informed by her experiences growing up in El Paso, living in Glasgow, Scotland and Mesa, Arizona. She is also a co-editor for Storied Deserts: Reimagining Global Arid Lands, an environmental humanities collection interested in the world’s deserts, due out in 2024 with Routledge. As a result of this project she has become increasingly committed to learning about desert communities around the planet and hopes to continue international and interdisciplinary collaborations like the “Ecologies of Justice” symposium she co-hosted with colleagues Dr. Mako Ward and Dr. Lisa Han.

Future writing projects include a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Thoreau in which she puts the nineteenth century author’s essay “Walking” in conversation with US-Mexico migrant border crossing in the twenty-first century and a chapter for the edited volume Sheridan’s Wests where she investigates the limits of law and lawlessness in the extreme environments that make the setting for Sicario and Wind River.

Her public facing scholarship includes a co-authored article on Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, “What Dune Should Teach Us About the Beauty of ‘Wastelands’” and interviews with the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology podcast Spotlights, the Social Transformation Lab at Arizona State University’s podcast Okay! School Me, and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s IDEAS. 

Through her scholarship and teaching, she encourages care about the various communities, especially Latinx and Indigenous peoples, whose desert placemaking and placekeeping, despite centuries of colonial violences, contains hope, wonder, and joy.

Contact Information

Email: cosuna3@utep.edu

Hudspeth Hall 221

Personal Information

PhD, Arizona State University

Assistant Professor