Jessica Carey-Webb, PhD
Associate Professor

- Department:
- Spanish & Portuguese
- Email:
- jcareywebb@unm.edu
Bio:
- PhD, University of Texas Austin, 2018
- MA, University of Texas Austin, 2015
- BA, University of Michigan, 2011
Jessica Carey-Webb is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and Director of Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of New Mexico. Her research examines Latin American literature, history, and media through an environmentally engaged cultural studies lens, with a primary focus on the Amazon region. Grounded in the environmental humanities and interdisciplinary, comparative approaches, her work analyzes how race, gender, and ecology intersect within histories of imperialism, extractivism, and modernization. She is the author of Eyes on Amazonia: Transnational Perspectives on the Rubber Boom Frontier (Vanderbilt University Press, 2024), which investigates how race and gender shaped imperial structures in the Amazon during the first rubber boom (1875–1912). Her scholarship spans peer-reviewed research, policy-oriented work, and public-facing writing that bridges academic inquiry with environmental and social justice concerns, addressing questions of representation, environmental pedagogy, and cultural responses to ecological crisis. Carey-Webb previously served as a Mellon/ACLS Public Fellow at the Natural Resources Defense Council, where she worked on ecological policy across Latin America. Her current research focuses on a short-lived independent polity in the Amazon, using archival and cultural analysis to explore alternative territorial imaginaries and their implications for understanding colonialism, nation-building, and extractivism.
