Participants

PARTCIPICANTS

Daniel Cooper Alarconis Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona. His teaching and research interests include Latino/Latina literatures, especially Chicano/Chicana; Mexicanness in English-language literatures; travel narratives and the study of travel, migration, and tourism. He is the author of The Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination, which articulates the concept of "Mexicanness" as the product of a complex network of discourses encompassing the rhetoric of Chicano nationalism, English-language literature about Mexico, and Mexican tourist propaganda.

Paula Smith Allen is Associate Professor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. Her current research interests focus on the dynamics of political voice as it relates to new world experiences, on the distinctions between "private" and "public" voices, and on questions relating to how colonial experiences have come to shape women's opportunities for contemporary feminist expression.

Antonio Barrenechea is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington. As a Trans-American literary studies specialist at the University of Mary Washington, he has developed two new courses in the field: "New World Writing in the Colonial Period" and "Literature and Nation-Building in the American Republics." His current book manuscript, tentatively titled America Unbound: New World Authorship and the Encyclopedic Novel Genre, 1850-1975, is a comparative study of U.S. and Latin American Literature in relation to the incorporation of monsters, maps, and marvelous geographies in the novels of Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, and Carlos Fuentes. Along with Linn Cary Mehta, he is currently working on a three-volume anthology on the Literatures of the Americas from the pre-Columbian era to the present.

Caroline Brown is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Montreal. A comparatist, she concentrates on 20th Century U.S. Literature and the literature of the African Diaspora, particularly in their intersection with critical race theory, women's writing, and aesthetics. Her articles have appeared in African American Review, Obsidian, and the National Women's Studies Association Journal. She is currently completing Art and Survival: Performing Identity in Black Women's Literature, which examines how aesthetics and performance practices mediate the expression of identity and political resistance. A feminist interdisciplinary analysis, it blends fictional texts, visual art, music, performance art, and diaspora studies.

James Davis is Assistant Professor in the English department and the American Studies program at Brooklyn College, and specializes in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century American literature and in Cultural Studies. His first book, Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933, examines the critical role that racial thinking played in the emergence of consumer culture in the U.S. He is currently writing about the work of Eric Walrond, a Caribbean-born journalist and fiction writer who rose to modest fame during the Harlem Renaissance. This research will explore how Walrond's writing illuminates, and is illuminated by, concurrent developments in work on the African diaspora and Black transnationalism, such as the Black Atlantic connections of the Harlem Renaissance and the anti-colonial movements between the wars.

Michael Dowdy is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry at Hunter College, and focuses his work on Latina/o poetry and 20th Century Latin American poetry. His current research explores how poets of the Americas articulate the effects of globalization, and particularly examines how these poets envision processes of transnational representation, how they understand the global economic forces that constrain the agency of the poor, and how they show connections between supposedly isolated cultural contexts and geographical boundaries. The project asks how a poetics might embody the social and psychic effects of global economic development as seen in local and national contexts in the Americas.

Monika Giacoppe is Associate Professor of Literature at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Her teaching spans subject matter including international women's writing, the development of the novel, and the literatures of the Americas. Her research interests include Inter-American literature and translation theory and practice; most recently, she has published, with Christiane Makward, a translated collection of short fiction by Swiss author S. Corinna Bille. Her new research project examines the transnational and historical nature of Cajun and Acadian writing.

John Gruesser is Professor of English at Kean University. He has published in the areas of African American literature and culture, postcolonial literature and theory, American literature (especially nineteenth-century), and detective fiction, and he is the author of Confluences: Postcolonialism, African American Literary Studies, and the Black Atlantic. His teaching interests beyond these four areas include the novel, world literature, theory and criticism, and American autobiography.

Marissa López is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles where she is also affiliated with the Chicano Studies Research Center and the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department. She is the author of "The Political Economy of Early Chicano Historiography," forthcoming in American Literary History, and is currently working on her book, The Chicano Nation in a Global Age: Transnationalism and Narrative Form.

Juliet Lynd is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at St. Olaf College. She works in the fields of contemporary Latin American literary and cultural production, specializing in the Southern Cone and Mexico. Her interest in forging a Hemispheric American literature stems from her study of how literary texts map changing power configurations brought about by globalization. She is currently working on a book project that examines discourses of neoliberalism and globalization in Chilean literature written after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Her teaching interests include topics on memory and identity, gender studies and cultural production under authoritarianism.

Hiram Perez is Visiting Professor of English at Montclair State University. His current research investigates racialized desire as constructed and articulated through formations of gay cosmopolitanism. He is particularly interested in examining the tensions between poststructuralist thought and identity politics, with the aim of recuperating forms of identity politics for queer theory. Broader interests include scholarship on gay tourism, queer migration and diaspora, cosmopolitanism, and theories of film spectatorship.

Justin Read is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at SUNY Buffalo. His research examines 20th-century aesthetic modernisms (primarily in poetry and architecture) and political-economic modernization in a hemispheric American context, with particular emphasis on Brazil. His first book, Inter:America, is currently under review, and he has begun work on a second, Alternative Functions: Poetics, Architecture, and Political Economy of Modernization in Latin America.

Cheryl Smith is Assistant Professor of English and WAC faculty coordinator at Baruch College, in the City University of New York (CUNY) system. There, she teaches early American literature and writing, and is developing a new course called "Captivity Narratives and the Imagining of America," which she will teach in fall 2007. Her current research focuses on colonialism, seventeenth-century female authorship, Puritan New England, and the politics of Indian captivity narratives, especially those written by women. She is interested in how reader expectations and fantasies about nationhood and otherness influenced contact and captivity narratives in the New World. This summer, she plans to research the ways in which Spanish (and possibly French) narratives of Indian captivity anticipate, intersect with, and diverge from the enormously popular English women's captivity tales of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Amy Spellacy is a lecturer in History and Literature at Harvard University. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. literature, literature and culture of the Americas, U.S. Latino/a literature, and transnational literary and cultural studies. She has recently taught interdisciplinary courses on "Empire and the Americas in the Nineteenth Century" and "A Cultural History of the Banana." Her dissertation, "Neighbors North and South: Literary Culture, Political Rhetoric and Inter-American Relations in the Era of the Good Neighbor Policy, 1928-1948," traces the deployment and circulation of the trope of the neighbor in social and cultural texts in the United States and Latin America.

Jennifer Williams is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at Michigan State University. Her teaching and research interests include 20th century African American and black diasporic literature and culture; trauma studies; migration; and women, gender and sexuality studies.