Carolyn Fornoff's research engages Mexican and Central American culture through the lens of ecocriticism. It explores how artists and writers portray the intersection between environmental and social justice through representational modes that range from speculative fiction to the documentary.

Fornoff's in-process monograph, Uncertain Futures: Environmental Change in Mexico and Central America,  considers contemporary representations of anthropogenic environmental change. It asks how we anticipate and adapt to environmental transformations that are both underway and yet to come. It argues that the unpredictability of environmental rupture (and its corollaries, like drought and extinction) have put the future into doubt, prompting writers and artists to reimagine ways of living on a planet governed by different climatic rules.

As part of broader research in the environmental humanities, Fornoff is co-editing two collections:

Timescales: Ecological Temporalities Across Disciplines, co-edited with Bethany Wiggin and Patricia Kim, brings together interdisciplinary research on the question of time in the Anthropocene.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, co-edited with Gisela Heffes, theorizes the rich cinematic production coming out of Latin America that attends to environmental questions.