More-than-Human Testimony in Colombia and Guatemala

Event details Date: Wednesday, September 30, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM to 1:30 PM Location: Taper Hall (THH) - 309K - 3501 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles, CA 90089 Type: Lecture / Talk / Workshop Campus: University Park Campus Department: Campus Humanities, Center for Advanced Genocide Research Audience: Students, Alumni, Faculty/Staff About this event A public lecture by Santiago Eslava-Bejarano (PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture, USC) 2026 Beth and Arthur Lev Student Research Fellow Organized by the USC Dornsife Center for Advanced Genocide Research| Cosponsored by the USC Department of Comparative Literature Can nonhuman beings bear witness to war and genocide? If so, what forms might their testimonies take, and how might we learn to read them? In 2022, the Colombian Truth Commission’s Final Report incorporated the “testimony of nature” as part of the official memory of more than sixty years of armed conflict. Although this decision has raised questions about language, translation, and representation, it also invites us to consider if the archives of a human conflict can preserve more-than-human memories of war. Drawing on the Colombian experience and on close-reading methodologies from literary studies, Santiago Eslava-Bejarano listened to dozens of audiovisual survivor testimonies by the Guatemalan genocide held in the Visual History Archive. In this talk, he explores the concept of more-than-human memory, examining how war and genocide inflict traumatic violence upon entire territories, affecting humans and other forms of life in interconnected ways, and tracing how the effects of that violence may be registered and remembered. Register Here Lunch will be served. Santiago Eslava-Bejarano is a third-year PhD student in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture at the University of Southern California. He holds an MA in Latin American Literature from the University of California, Davis, where he was a Provost Fellow, and an MA in Literature and a BA in Philosophy from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia. His research lies at the intersection of environmental humanities, animal studies, and memory studies, with a focus on literary theory, interspecies communication and ethics, and phenomenology. His work has been published in journals such as Latin American Literary Review, Vox Patrum, and Nova Tellus. Official event details: https://calendar.usc.edu/event/more-than-human-testimony-in-colombia-and-guatemala