Anna Andreeva is a New York City based textile conservator and scholar of Hispanic culture. Ms. Andreeva received her Master’s degree in Fashion and Textile Studies (History, Theory, Museum Practice) from the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. She currently works in her field at the Textile Conservation Lab at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, with projects ranging from 16th century ecclesiastic embroideries to Sheila Hicks’ modern fiber installations. Ms. Andreeva’s passion is in the examination, research and conservation of Hispanic textiles. In the course of her current fellowship at the Hispanic Society of America, Ms. Andreeva enjoyed the opportunity to review the larger part of the textile collection at the museum and implement an upgrade in the textile storage system. Concurrently, she has been working closely with the mantones de Manila or Chinese-style embroidered shawls marketed through the Philippines, making these objects the focus of her research. At the Hispanic Society, Ms. Andreeva has been collaborating with Maestra Hélène Fontoira Marzin, Head of the Conservation Department at the HSM&L, and curators Dr. Noemí Espinosa and Dr. Marcus Burke.
Antonio Córdoba is Associate Professor at Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Manhattan College, where he teaches courses on Latin American and Iberian literature, film, and culture. His main focus of study is Latin American and Spanish science fiction, and the relationship between modernity and the sacred. He has coedited The Modern and the Sacred in Urban Spain: Beyond the Secular City (Palgrave MacMillan, 2016) and Rite, Flesh, Stone: The Matter of Death in Contemporary Spanish Culture, 1959-2020 (Vanderbilt University Press, 2021) and published ¿Extranjero en tierra extraña?: El género de la ciencia ficción en América Latina [Stranger in a Strange Land? The Science Fiction Genre in Latin America] (University of Sevilla Press, 2011) He has written articles and book chapters on Spanish horror and science fiction films, Latin American science fiction novels, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño, and Brazilian science fiction cinema. At the moment he is working on a monograph tentatively titled Exhausted Futures: Speculative Fiction, Sacrifice, and the Limits of Political Imagination in Contemporary Spain.
Xavier Dapena joined Iowa State’s faculty as an assistant professor in 2021, after receiving his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies and Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. For the academic year 2019-2020, Dapena was selected as a Mellon Research Fellow by the Wolf Humanities Center. Based on his dissertation, he received the Provost Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Innovation Research Award from the University of Pennsylvania and the international grant, the Lucy Shelton Caswell Research Award, from The Ohio State University. His research projects have inspired several peer-reviewed articles published in journals and edited volumes, and also guest lectures in different universities such as Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles. Currently, he is co-editing a volume titled The Political Imagination in Spanish Graphic Narrative and working on his first book project, “Nobody expects the Spanish Revolution”: Graphic Narrative in Contemporary Spain.
Bob Davidson, Professor of Spanish and Catalan and Affiliate Faculty with the Culinaria Research Centre, specializes in Modern Peninsular Literature and Culture with an emphasis on cultural theories of food and hospitality. He is the author of Jazz Age Barcelona (U of Toronto Press, 2009; shortlisted for the Canada Prize in the Humanities) and The Hotel: Occupied Space (UTP, 2018). His current work includes a study of material culture and early 20th-century Spanish and Catalan narrative (By and About Things) and a new research project entitled The Scent of Spain: Fragrance, Odour and Culture that considers key fragrances and scents that contributed to the Spanish olfactory environment from the beginning of the modern fragrance industry in the country to the early 2000s. Prof. Davidson currently serves as Director of the Northrop Frye Centre at Victoria College and as Chair of the Manuscript Review Committee of University of Toronto Press. He takes his martini with a little extra vermouth and an olive.
Maria J Feliciano is an independent scholar based in New York City. Her work focuses on the visual culture of the medieval and early modern Iberian worlds, particularly on the influence of the arts of Islam in the artistic developments of Peninsular and Viceregal societies. She directs the Medieval Textiles in Iberia and the Mediterranean Research Project and is a member of the research team lead by Therese Martin (CSIC, Madrid), The Medieval Iberian Treasury in Context: Collections, Connections, and Representations on the Peninsula and Beyond.
Moisés Hassan is a doctoral candidate in Hispanic Languages and Literature at Stony Brook University, working on the visualization of ethnicity in comics and graphic novels. His research focuses on the depiction and individual experiences of Asian American and Latinx communities in American comics. Through his Public Humanities Fellowship, he is implementing a project called “Empowering Through Visual Narratives,” a workshop series aimed at middle-school students which involves reading and creating comics. In 2020, he co-created “Pensando Xībānyá,” an online platform to dialogue with voices from the Chinese diaspora in Spain.
Nicholas R. Jones (Yale) is the former 2021-2022 King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center’s (KJCC) Scholar-in-Residence at New York University. He is the author of the prize-winning Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) and Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production (Routledge, January 2021) with Chad Leahy. Jones also co-edits the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham. Jones’s research has been generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and he is completing his second solo-authored monograph entitled Cervantine Blackness. Jones has also held visiting appointments at Georgetown University and New York University.
Ana María G. Laguna is Professor of Spanish and Golden Age Literature at Rutgers University-Camden, USA. She is also an executive member of the Cervantes Society of America and an Associate Editor of their bulletin, Cervantes. Besides Cervantes, the Golden Age, and the Battle for Cultural Identity in 20th-Century Spain (Bloomsbury, 2021), she has published two more books, Cervantes and the Pictorial Imagination (Bucknell UP, 2009) and the co-edited volume Goodbye Eros: Recasting Forms and Norms of Love in the Age of Cervantes (U of Toronto P, 2020). Her work has been awarded fellowships by (among others) the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Ministry of Culture of Spain and United States Universities and the Shakespeare Folger Institute. Her research explores the relationship among literature, politics, and the visual arts, focusing on how literature reflects prominent artistic and socio-political anxieties. As a comparatist critic, she relates visual and verbal domains, multiple national traditions, and disparate chronologies, producing scholarship that expands the scope and impact of Spanish literary study.
Christina H. Lee is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. As of July 2022, she will be promoted to Full Professor. Christina Lee was born in South Korea and raised in Argentina. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a concentration in Latin American literature and earned a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton. She returned to Princeton in 2007 after teaching at Connecticut College, San Jose State University, UC Berkeley, and Harvard University. She teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in her department and, occasionally, for the Council of the Humanities and the Freshman Seminar Program.Her publications include: Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines of Early Spanish Rule (Oxford University Press, 2021), The Anxiety of Sameness in Early Modern Spain (Manchester University Press, 2015), The Spanish Pacific, 1521-1815: A Reader of Primary Sources (with Ricardo Padrón, Amsterdam University Press, 2020), the collection of essays Western Visions of Far East in a Transpacific Age (Routledge [Ashgate], 2012), Reading and Writing Subjects in Medieval and Golden Age Spain: Essays in Honor of Ronald E. Surtz (with José Luis Gastañaga, Juan de la Cuesta, 2016), and the Spanish edition of Lope de Vega’s Los mártires de Japón (Juan de la Cuesta, 2006). She is also the co-editor of the global history book series Connected Histories in Early Modern Europe (with Julia Schleck), at Amsterdam University Press.
Christine M. Martínez is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. Her research and teaching develop ecofeminist and ecocritical readings of film, comics, literature and photography that critique neoliberal capitalism and consumer society in Spain and beyond. She is particularly interested in communities and creators that imagine socially desirable and ecologically sustainable alternatives through decolonizing and re-localizing practices of economy, community engagement and agroecology. She is an active member of the Ecopedagogy Working Group with ALCES XXI and has published various articles and book chapters on ecological thought and Spanish comics in The Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, in Consequential Art: Comics Culture in Contemporary Spain (Edited by Samuel Amago and Matthew Marr, Toronto U.P., 2019) and with co-author Jorge Catalá in the forthcoming Companion to Spanish Environmental Cultural Studies (Edited by Luis I. Prádanos, Tamesis, 2023).
Juan Jesús Payán is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at Lehman College (City University of New York, CUNY). He has two PhDs, one in Hispanic Philology from the University of Cádiz (Spain), and the another in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research focuses on the interplay between national identity and the fantastic imagination in Spanish literature, painting, and graphic novels. In his upcoming book, Los conjuros del asombro (Conjuring Wonder), Prof. Payán problematizes how the fantastic came to be as a cultural construct and examines how nationalism shaped the literary praxis of 19th-century Spanish writers. He has studied key contributions to the global fantastic by commonly neglected authors such as Martín Zapata, José María Blanco White, Fernán Caballero, Jorge Montgomery, Antonio Ros de Olano, Luis García de Luna, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Rosalía de Castro, and Gaspar Núñez de Arce. His ongoing research explores the underlining interpretations of Goya’s legacy in comics (Mike Mignola) and graphic novels (Diego Olmos, Ivana & Gradimir Smudja, Olivier Bleys/ Benjamin Bonzonnet, El Torres/Fran Galán, Manuel Gutiérrez/Manuel Romero).
Louisa Raitt is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, focusing on 15th- to 18th-century art of the Spanish World, with particular interest in painting and material culture of Viceregal New Spain. Her research involves artistic expressions of religio-political controversies, the fabrication and trade of export objects, and production and collection as vehicles of self-fashioning. Her dissertation interrogates portraits of elite women in Colonial Mexico. After spending 2020-2021 as the Marica and Jan Vilcek Curatorial Fellow for Colonial Latin American Art in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she was hired as a Research Associate and Bibliographer for Hispanic and Latinx Art at The Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library. Louisa is also the current graduate student representative on the board of the Society for Iberian Global Art (SIGA).
Tara Zanardi is Associate Professor of Art History at Hunter College. She has published widely on the visual and material culture of eighteenth-century Spain, including Framing Majismo: Art and Royal Identity in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2016). Her current work includes an edited volume, Intimate Interiors: Sex, Politics, and Material Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Bedroom and Boudoir (forthcoming from Bloomsbury, 2023) in which she examines Philip V and Isabel de Farnesio’s shared lacquer bedroom from San Ildefonso de La Granja and a book titled Artful Politics and Bourbon Identity: The Porcelain Room at Aranjuez.