Ethan Madarieta earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a graduate Minor in Latina/o Studies and a Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Madarieta’s research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of Critical Indigenous, Black, and Latin American studies with specializations in Critical Indigenous studies, Race Critical studies, Latin American studies, Queer Theory, and Literary Theory with an emphasis on Memory, Translation, and Poststructuralist theories.

Madarieta’s forthcoming book, Territorial Aporia: On Mapuche Memory and Translation Beyond Colonial Logics (April 2026), under contract with Northwestern University Press, argues that the primary site of settler and Indigenous antagonisms is not “land,” as ubiquitously asserted, but the overlapping and incommensurate conceptual orders within which “land” and “body” are constituted and accrue meaning. Madarieta shows how understandings of this central antagonism must be reassessed as and across an epistemological incommensurability, where the terms of relation – the naming of places, of things, of self (identity), and other – are in a constant and perpetual state of translation. This argument unsettles the stability and universality of “land” and “body” by calling into question “what” can or will be restored or returned, to “whom,” and how. Weaving together Mapuche and Latin American historical, philosophical, and literary studies with Global Critical Theory and Critical Indigenous Studies, Territorial Aporia demonstrates how Mapuche kimün (knowledge) and rakiduam (thought) precedes and will exceed the nation state, colonial racial capitalism, and the end of the “world” as “we know it.”

Madarieta is also the editor of the forthcoming edited volume, Critical Indigenous Memory Studies (forthcoming 2026), under contract with Bloomsbury Academic Press. The collection explores Indigenous philosophies and practices of memory and their ontological, ecological, political, and spiritual dimensions. The essays within this collection emerge from the global field of Critical Indigenous Studies and assert that the intellectual foundations and critical genealogy of an Indigenous Memory Studies is to be found in Critical Indigenous Studies and Peoples’ languages and literatures – oral and textual – rather than in the field of Memory Studies. Each essay thus attends to how Indigenous memory is distinct from universalizing conceptions of memory which assume the anthropocentric “world” as memory’s index, its Western ontological “human” and legal “person” as its primary subject, and the linear progression and sequentiality of its temporalities and histories. Simultaneously, the essays pursue what generative conversations with Memory Studies paradigms such as its psychological, neuroscientific, epigenetic, and sociological categories might have when thought through a Critical Indigenous Memory Studies lens.

Each of my classes incorporates forms of embodied and experiential learning. Each class focuses on cultivating a learning environment that facilitates the relationships needed for engaging in the demanding but necessary work of critical self-reflection and social analysis. I encourage students to be bold in their analyses to contend with the ongoing violent legacies of slavery, colonialism, dispossession, and projects of elimination. I teach the importance of relationality in knowledge production and identify pedagogy as a methodology for political, social, and self-transformation.

“If ‘Everything is mapu’: Beyond Colonial Object Relations in Wallmapu.” In “Expanding Black and Indigenous Ecologies,” Special Issue, English Language Notes, 62, no. 1, 2024: 65–80. Online/Print.

“Mapuche Hunger Strikes as a Performance of Re-membering.” Critical Memory Studies: New Approaches. Brett A. Kaplan, ed., Bloomsbury Academic, May 2023. Ebook/Print.

“The Body Is (Not) the Land: Mapuche Hunger Strikes and the Territorial Aporia.” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 5, no. 3, December 2022: 570-602. Online/Print.

“the (dissenting) line/la línea (disidente)” Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body, bilingual catalogue, Grossman Gallery, Lafayette College, 2022: 82-91. Ebook/Print.

“An Impulse Toward Agency: Teaching Sexual Violence in Afro-Latina/o/x Literature.” #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture. Mary K. Holland and Heather Hewett, eds., Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Ebook/Print.

“‘Marichiweu’: Performances of Memory and Mapuche Presence in Guillermo Calderón’s Villa.” Latin American Theatre Review, Vol 53 No 1: Spring 2020. Online/Print.

“silence might have its own significance: an interview with Daniel Borzutzky.” A Contracorriente: una revista de estudios latinoamericanos 17, no 1: Fall 2019. Online/Print.

Assistant Professor of English and Program for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the State University of New York at New Paltz (SUNY New Paltz)

SUNY PRODiG Scholar (2020-2021)