Hisham Aidi, Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of International and Public Affairs, Columbia
Hisham Aidi‘s research interests include cultural globalization and the political economy of race and social movements. He received his PhD in political science from Columbia University, and has taught at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and at the Driskell Center for the Study of the African Diaspora at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Redeploying the State (Palgrave, 2008) a comparative study of neo-liberalism and labor movements in Latin America; and co-editor, with Manning Marable, of Black Routes to Islam (Palgrave, 2009). In 2002–2003, Aidi was a consultant for UNDP’s Human Development Report. From 2000 to 2003, he was part of Harvard University’s Encarta Africana project, and worked as a cultural reporter, covering youth culture and immigration in Harlem and the Bronx, for Africana, The New African and ColorLines. More recently, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, The Nation and The New Yorker. Since 2007, he has been a contributing editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture, Politics and Society. Aidi is the author most recently of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture (Pantheon, 2014), a study of American cultural diplomacy and winner of the American Book Award of 2015.
Abigail Balbale, Assistant Professor, NYU
Prof. Balbale’s research focuses on the intersection of political power, religious ideology and visual and material culture in the medieval Islamic world. She is particularly interested in how rulers legitimated their power through cultural production, holy war and diplomacy. Her current book project, tentatively entitled “Wolf King of Glorious Memory: Affiliation, Accommodation and Resistance in Ibn Mardanīsh’s al-Andalus,” centers on an enigmatic twelfth-century ruler who fought the Marrakech-based Almohad dynasty through alliance with his Christian neighbors and asserted his authority with reference to the Abbasid caliphate in the east. Generally, the book explores how Muslim rulers in the Western Mediterranean adapted and transformed ideologies and material symbols of power from the broader Islamic world in order to assert their authority. I use sources including chronicles, poetry and chancery documents, as well as coins, architecture, and portable objects, that reveal both the interconnectedness of the Islamic world and the intimacy between the Christians and Muslims who competed for territory in the Western Mediterranean. Earlier work, including The Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews, and Muslims in the Making of Castilian Culture (Yale University Press, 2008), which she co-authored with art historian Jerrilynn Dodds and literary historian María Rosa Menocal, used a similar range of sources to explore how Castilian rulers and religious leaders created a new imperial culture by adopting elements of Islamic civilization, even as they waged military and ideological battles against their Muslim subjects and neighbors.
Lena Burgos-Lafuente, Associate Professor, Stony Brook
Lena Burgos-Lafuente received her PhD from New York University in 2011 and is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University (SUNY) and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center (LACS). She writes on hemispheric poetry, Caribbean aesthetics and intellectual history, auralities, archipelagic thought, and transatlantic literary and political crossings in the first half of the twentieth century. She is the author of A la escucha del destiempo: poéticas de la posguerra en el Caribe transatlántico (forthcoming, Iberoamericana Vervuert), editor of the special issue Untendered Eyes: Literary Politics of Julia de Burgos (CENTRO Journal, 2014), and co-editor of María Zambrano in Dialogue (Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2015). She wrote the prologue and collaborated with the critical edition of Julia de Burgos, Cartas a Consuelo (Folium, 2014). She is co-editor of The Puerto Rico Reader (Duke University Press). Among her awards and honors, she was appointed the 2019-20 Wilbur Marvin Scholar of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University for her current book project, A la izquierda de la izquierda: Cosmopolitan Communism in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Caribbean (1920-1959), and is a 2015 recipient of a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Natalia Castro Picón, Assistant Professor, Princeton University
Natalia Castro Picón finished her Ph.D. at The Graduate Center (City University of New York) and her B.A. at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Her main fields of study are modern and contemporary Iberian literature and culture as well as transatlantic Iberian relations in the neoliberal context. She combines in her research and classes tools and methods from Cultural Studies with a Glottopolitical perspective, which focuses on the political condition of language and discourse. She is currently working on her first book about the apocalyptic representations of crisis in culture and social movements in Spain from the 2008 economic depression until the 2020 pandemic. It is her main thesis that different uses of apocalyptic imaginaries activate in diverse ways the dual eschatological sense of the trope—the end of the world and the beginning of a new one—pursuing different political aims and projecting different cultural regimes of sense. While one part of the cultural production and public discourse warns that to jeopardize the hegemonic system entails the risk of the end of the world, another part mobilizes and embodies apocalyptic imageries to represent the end of capitalism and propose, experiment, and fantasize about new ways of social organization.
Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Professor Emerita, Stony Brook University
Lou Charnon-Deutsch’s earliest training was in the School of Chicago Criticism that strongly influenced her first book, a structuralist study of the artistic short story of 19th century Spain. By the mid-eighties, however, she broadened her interests to include applied feminist theory and psychoanalytic theory. Her following two books examined issues of gender and representation in well-known 19th century male-authored texts, and in the fiction of both canonical and non-canonical women writers. More recently, she has been working on systems of representation in popular Spanish culture, especially the illustrated Spanish periodicals that are the subject of her most recent book, Hold That Pose. At present she is working on the topic of conspiracy theories in nineteenth-century European fiction. She has served as President of Feministas Unidas (1992-1994). At Stony Brook, she is an affiliate of Women’s Studies and of Comparative Literature.
Pedro Costa, Filmmaker
Pedro Costa is one of Portugal’s most important film directors. As a student, he abandoned his degree in history in order to attend the classes of the poet and filmmaker António Reis at the Lisbon Film School. His first film Blood had its world premiere at the Mostra Cinematografica di Venezia in 1989. Casa de Lava, his second feature, shot in Cabo Verde, was screened in Cannes in the selection Un Certain Regard in 1994. His following film, Bones was awarded an Osella d’Oro in Venice in 1997. His other feature films include In Vanda’s Room and the documentaries Where does your hidden smile lie on the work of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub and Ne change rien with Jeanne Balibar. Horse Money was awarded the Leopard for Best Direction at the Locarno Film Festival in 2014. Vitalina Varela won the Golden Leopard and the Best Actress Prize at the same festival in 2019. His work is regularly presented in Cinematheques and Museums around the world.
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián, Associate Professor, Durham University
Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián is Associate Professor of Hispanic and Visual Culture Studies at Durham University, United Kingdom. He has published extensively on the contemporary and postcolonial Caribbean, Atlantic island spaces, the avant-garde and Surrealism, and Latin American cinemas and visual cultures. His work has appeared in Cultural Dynamics, The Global South, Hispanic Research Journal, Journal of Romance Studies, and Third Text, as well as in edited collections and exhibition catalogues. He is an associate editor of Cultural Dynamics, a co-editor of The Film Archipelago: Islands in Latin American Cinema (Bloomsbury, January 2022), and the author of On Tropical Grounds: Insularity and the Avant-Garde in the Caribbean and the Canary Islands (forthcoming in 2022).
Daniel Hershenzon, Associate Professor, University of Connecticut
Daniel Hershenzon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Captive Sea: Slavery, Commerce, and Communication in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), which has won Honorable Mention in the Mediterranean Seminar First Book Prize in 2021, and has been awarded the 2019 Best First Book in Iberian History and the University of Connecticut Sharon Harris Book Award. Hershenzon has published articles on early modern peninsular history in its Mediterranean context in Past and Present, Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales, Journal of Early Modern History, African Economic History, Philological Encounters, and in edited volumes. He is currently an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellow and is working on his new book project, Captive Objects: Religious Artifacts, Piracy and Slavery in the Early Modern Mediterranean
Thenesoya V. Martín De la Nuez, Instructor, Duke University, FAS Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
Thenesoya V. Martín De la Nuez (Gran Canaria) works as an Instructor at Duke University and holds a FAS postdoctoral position at Harvard University. She has also been a Visiting Professor at Vassar College, NY. She is a scholar of Modern and Contemporary Spanish (Pen)Insular, and African literature and culture in Spanish. Her interests span various fields, including Islands and Archipelagic Studies, postcolonial approaches to Environmental Humanities, Iberian global colonialism, and transoceanic imaginaries in the era of the Anthropocene. Thenesoya is currently developing her book on African and Asian literatures in Spanish —tentatively titled De-centering Hispanism. Post-Colonial Peripheries into Focus— to relationally rethink Hispanophone African and Asian literature and cultural production. Her publications include an annotated edition of the Equatoguinean novel Cuando a Guinea se iba por mar, by Ávila Laurel. She is about to publish a critical edition of an unpublished Canarian novel from 1957, Las islas van mar afuera, by Alfonso García Ramos. While pursuing her Ph.D. at Harvard, she created the cultural project CISLANDERUS, about Canarian immigration to the United States. This research has resulted in a documentary film, Canarians in the United States, and a traveling photographic exhibition both in Spain and the United States. Thenesoya holds an M.A. and B.A. in Comparative Literature at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain, and a B.A. degree in Hispanic Philology at the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain. She lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband and her daughter Olivia.
Susan Martin-Márquez, Professor, Rutgers
Professor Martin-Márquez’s research and teaching center on modern Spanish Peninsular cultural studies and Spanish-language film. She teaches courses on world cinema. Her film-related books include Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford UP, 1999), and the collaborative project, Cinema and Everyday Life in 1940s and 1950s Spain: An Oral History (Berghahn Books, forthcoming 2011). Other scholarly work focuses on questions of coloniality and identity. Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (Yale UP, 2008) examines the anxious reformulation of centralist and peripheral national identities resulting from Spaniards’ post-Enlightenment rediscovery of their “African inheritance,” precisely at a time in which “scientific racism” rose to dominance, and the Spanish nation began investing in new colonial regimes in Africa. Professor Martin-Márquez’s current research focuses on alternative and “third cinema” movements of the 1960s; she has also begun a project on transatlantic and transpacific encounters in Spain’s penal colonies in Africa.
Christine Martinez, Postdoctoral Fellow, NYU
Christine M. Martínez (PhD New York University) is a postdoctoral teacher and researcher with New York University. Her research focuses on cultural materials (cinema, photojournalism, comics, novels) produced in Spain and Mediterranean Europe during periods of accelerated economic growth and crisis. While much scholarship in the environmental humanities focuses on catastrophe and apocalypse, she is interested in what a focus on processes of decay, biological limits, and decolonized world views contributes to imagining socially desirable futures and ecologically resilient communities. She has also published numerous articles and book chapters on the ecological imagination of Spanish comics.
Luis Moreno Caballud, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Luis Moreno Caballud’s research interests include philosophy, literature, film, and cultural history. He specialize in modern and contemporary Iberian studies. His work analyzes the relationship between the tradition of Western metaphysics and capitalism as a way of life. He study capitalism as an extension of the Western promise of transcendence, and of its parallel disavowal of finite, vulnerable, interdependent life. One aspect of His work is a focus on the cultural transformations brought out by capitalism in Spain. He has studied representations of rural and peasant cultures in the context of the homogenization caused by so-called “economic modernization” during the Franco dictatorship and the transition to democracy. His current book project is tentatively titled Form of Life. Artistic and Literary Explorations of a Non-Capitalist Existence. It studies the crucial role of aesthetics in displacing neoliberal subjectivities. He investigates three contemporary literary and artistic lines of flight: an animist line, which displaces the contemporary crisis of experience by questioning the Western dualism between subject and object; a feminist line, which understands the creation of imaginaries as one of the everyday necessary material activities that sustain life; and an equalitarian line, which confronts the privatization of artistic creation and tries to uncover the abundant capabilities that we suppress in ourselves when we enter into the logic of individualist cultural authority.
Michelle Murray, Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University
Michelle Murray’s research and teaching focus on contemporary Spanish literature and film. Her first book Home Away from Home Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture (UNC Press for North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 2018) studies representations of immigrant women as domestic workers in contemporary Spain. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled Migrant Markets; this book explores migration, political economy, and trafficking in the Southern Mediterranean.
Sara Nadal-Melsió, Visiting Assistant Professor, NYU
Sara Nadal-Melsió is a NYC-based Catalan writer, curator, and teacher. She teaches in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at NYU. Previously, she has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and SOMA in Mexico City. Her essays have appeared in academic journals, various edited volumes, and museum catalogs. She is the co-author of Alrededor de/ Around and the editor of two special issues on cinema, The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism and The Militant Image: Temporal Disturbances of the Political Imagination. She has also co-curated a show on Allora & Calzadilla for the Fundació Tápies in Barcelona and has written a book essay about it, as well as edited a companion volume on the Puerto Rican crisis.
Matthew Nicdao, PhD Candidate, NYU
Matthew Nicdao (he/him/his) is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at NYU and Project Coordinator for Sulo. At the intersections of Philippine, Spanish Caribbean, and Peninsular Studies, his research explores questions of race and nation formation across the literary and visual cultures of nineteenth-century Spanish empire. His dissertation focuses on how the works of writers and artists from the Philippines and Puerto Rico challenged the racial limits of the modern Spanish nation and gestured toward other aesthetic and political possibilities. His research interests include anti-colonial thought and praxis, critical ethnic studies, comparative racializations, and literary and visual cultural production.
Francisco Quinteiro Pires, PhD Candidate, NYU
Francisco Quinteiro Pires is a journalist and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. His research focuses on the racialized and gendered representations of subjectivities in contemporary visual and literary cultures produced in Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa. His articles have appeared in Luso-Brazilian Review and Brasiliana: Journal of Brazilian Studies.
Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, Visiting Scholar, NYU Urban Democracy Lab and Adjunct Instructor, Fordham University
Vicente Rubio-Pueyo, originally from Spain, has been living in the US since 2006. An adjunct instructor at Fordham University, he writes on Spanish and US politics. His research is in the field of contemporary Spanish cultural studies with strong interdisciplinary ties to urban studies, political theory, media studies, and other fields. He is currently working a book on political cultures, the State, and movements in contemporary Spain from the 70’s Transition to the post-15M present context.
Glòria Salvadó-Corretger, Associate Professor, Pompeu Fabra University
Glòria Salvadó-Corretger is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication Studies at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona (Spain). Her published work includes contributions to academic journals and collaborative books on subjects such as Portuguese contemporary cinema, European and Spanish cinema, TV fiction, new forms of serial fiction and the work of Joaquín Jordà. She is the author of the book Espectres del cinema portugués contemporani (2012) and coeditor of Poéticas del gesto en el cine europeo contemporáneo (2013).
Alba Solà Garcia, PhD Candidate University of Pennsylvania
Alba Solà Garcia (Barcelona, 1986) se licenció en Humanidades (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, 2009), y realizó una estancia académica en la Universidad de las Américas (Puebla, México). Siguió su educación académica con un máster en Escritura Creativa (Universidad Pompeu Fabra, 2010) y otro sobre Literatura Latinoamericana (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2011). Ha trabajado, entre otras cosas, de profesora y editora, y actualmente está terminando su tesis doctoral en el departamento de Hispanic and Portuguese Studies de la Universidad de Pennsylvania, en Filadelfia. Su investigación se centra en luchas autónomas y barriales, contracultura y memoria colectiva en las periferias urbanas de Barcelona durante la transición y las primeras décadas democráticas. Ha recibido varios premios y becas para proyectos de investigación, entre ellos, para el desarrollo del archivo digital Memoria(s) de la periferia de Barcelona (1951-1992) [http://pennds.org/periferia/], que contiene parte de su investigación.
Justin Stearns, Associate Professor, NYU Abu Dhabi
Justin Stearns received his PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University in 2007, and has taught in the Arab Crossroads Program in New York University Abu Dhabi since 2010. His first book was Infectious Ideas: Contagion in Pre-Modern Islamic and Christian Thought in the Western Mediterranean (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011) and he has published articles in Islamic Law and Society, Medieval Encounters, Al-Qantara, and History Compass. His second book on the social status of the natural sciences in early modern Morocco entitled Revealed Sciences: The Natural Sciences in Islam in Seventeenth Century Morocco, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in 2021. He is currently working on an edition and translation of al-Yusi’s Discourses for the Library of Arabic Literature, the first volume of which appeared in 2020.