Cecily Raynor

Cecily Raynor is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Digital Humanities and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at McGill University. Her research examines contemporary Latin American literature and culture, digital media, and the changing relationship between language, technology, and the environment.

Her current book project, AI Beyond English: Language, Sovereignty, and New Geographies of Intelligence, investigates regional language models and other emerging AI infrastructures as cultural and political projects. Focusing particularly on Latin America, it considers how multilingual AI is reshaping questions of linguistic representation, translation, technological sovereignty, and the production, circulation, and accessibility of knowledge. It also examines the material infrastructures underlying artificial intelligence, including data centers, resource extraction, labor, and environmental impact.

Raynor is the author of Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces (Bucknell University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Digital Encounters: Envisioning Connectivity in Latin American Cultural Production (University of Toronto Press, 2023). She is also co-editing a volume on emerging forms of migration and belonging in contemporary Latin American culture. Her wider research encompasses computational approaches to Latin American literary production, electronic literature, environmental humanities, translation studies, and cultural politics.

She serves as an editor of the Journal of Cultural Analytics. Her recent invited and keynote lectures have addressed regional language models, linguistic pluralism, and the new geographies of artificial intelligence, including talks in Hong Kong and at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute.

Raynor holds an MSc from the London School of Economics, an MA from Middlebury College, and a PhD from Georgetown University.