María Gloria Robalino is a landscape architect and literary scholar. Her research focuses on poetry and poetics, visual culture, eco-political insurgencies, global entanglements, and the intersections between critical and creative practices. Before joining the Romance Languages department at WashU, she was the Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for teaching and research on women.

María Gloria earned her bachelor’s degree in philosophy and visual art from Swarthmore College, her master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard University, and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University, where she was the recipient of the department's 2025 Rubidge Prize for best dissertation.

Her current book manuscript, “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 long sixteenth century 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.

María Gloria's work has been published in Hispanic Review and the edited volume Digressions in Deep Time: Ecocritical Approaches to Literature and the Arts (Bloomsbury). She is on the editorial board of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.

Currently Teaching:

Spring 2026

Global Hispanophone Studies (Graduate Course)

Cultural Geographies of the Hispanophone World (Undergraduate Course)