Professor Pardo Porto’s research focuses on literary and visual works by contemporary Central American, Caribbean, and US-based Latin American artists. Her academic interests are migration studies, decolonial and affect theory, and ecocritical approaches to diasporic visual cultures and photography.

Pardo Porto’s current book project proposes a decolonial history of Latin American photography following transhistorical and transnational perspectives. Considering case studies from trans-regions like Central America and the Caribbean, this book offers counternarratives of gender, race, and ethnicity, and negotiate processes of immigration, native justice, collective memory, trauma, and cultural loss in diasporic formations across America. This work focuses on present-day ways of looking that emerge from past photographic practices, such as contemporary uses of early chemical processes, photo-based studio methods, and archival interventions.

Building on Pardo Porto’s interests in environmental humanities, photography, and material cultures, her second project examines artifacts and multimodal literary practices, such as contemporary uses of analog photography, recyclable cartonera publishing, herbariums, sustainable clothing and textiles, crafts, memorabilia, and diaries. This project addresses issues of urbanization/nature, indigenous animism, futurity and cosmogonies, globalization and toxicity.

Central American and Caribbean Trans-regional Studies; Visual Culture Studies; Latin American and Latino/a/x Photography; the History of Latin American Photography and Photobooks; Latin American Literatures, Visual Arts, and Material Cultures; Diaspora and Migration Studies; Decolonial Theory; Affect Theory; Environmental Humanities.

College Art Association

Latin American Studies Association

American Comparative Literature Association

Modern Language Association

Photography Network

Professor Pardo Porto has articles published and forthcoming in journals such as Letras hispanas, Romance Quarterly, and Istmo. She is currently co-editing two special issues of ISTMO, both entitled “Photography in, on, and from Central America,” and working in her first academic book.

Pardo Porto’s research and education projects have been funded by CUNY Humanities Alliance, The Publics Lab (CUNY), The Center for Latin American, Caribbean and Latino Studies, Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Teaching and Learning Center (CUNY).

Professor Pardo Porto was awarded the Graduate Center Dissertation Year Fellowship and the Doctoral Student Research Grant by The Graduate Center Office of the Provost (CUNY), and the Open Pedagogy Fellowship by The Mina Rees Library.

Before joining Syracuse University, Pardo Porto taught at the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies of the University of California, Los Angeles, and at Hunter, Lehman, and Queens colleges of the City University of New York (CUNY).