Pembroke Center

PhD 2024, Comparative Literature, Stanford University

M.A. 2017, Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design

B.A. 2013, Philosophy and Visual Art, Swarthmore College

María Gloria Robalino is an architect and scholar working at the intersections of environmental literature, visual culture and gender studies. Her dissertation, “Heightened Worlds: Vertiginous Imaginaries in the Pacific Ring of Fire, 1550-1670,” considers how indigenous notions of agentive space (space that has its own agency) transform over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and provoke experiences of vertigo in colonial societies from the Andes, Mesoamerica and the Philippines. The project sketches an innovative phenomenology of vertigo, articulating it as a specifically colonial affect.

Maria Gloria's work is forthcoming in Hispanic Review and the edited volume Digressions in Deep Time: Ecocritical Approaches to Literature and the Arts (Bloomsbury). 

In spring 2025, María Gloria will teach the course “Reading In Depth: Deep Time in Theory, Literature and Visual Art.” The course will run as a workshop and will approach the challenge that deep time poses to the human imagination by considering how artists and writers worldwide create their own scales of deep time and inscribe rhythms of human and non-human life into their works.