Larissa Brewer-García
Assistant Professor of Latin American and Spanish Literature, University of Chicago
Larissa Brewer-García specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean and Andes and the African diaspora in the Iberian empire. Within these areas, her research and teaching interests include the relationship between literature and law, genealogies of race and racism, humanism and Catholicism in the early modern Atlantic, and translation studies. Her current book project, Beyond Babel: Translation and the Making of Blackness in Colonial Spanish America, examines the influence of black interpreters and go-betweens in the creation and circulation of notions of blackness in writings from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America.
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz
Associate Professor of Latin American Literature, University of Chicago
Agnes Lugo-Ortiz is associate professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures at the University of Chicago. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, she obtained her BA in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, and her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. She is the author of Identidades imaginadas: Biografía y nacionalidad en el horizonte de la guerra (Cuba, 1860-1898) (University of Puerto Rico Press, 1999) and co-editor of Herencia: The Anthology of US Hispanic Writing (Oxford UP, 2001), En otra voz: Antología de la Literatura Hispana de los Estados Unidos, and Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Hertiage, volume V (both with Arte Público Press, 2002 and 2006 respectively), as well as of numerous essays on nineteenth- and twentieth -centuries on Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She is currently working on a book-length project on the visual culture of slavery in colonial Cuba. Akin to this endeavor, she has also completed an edited volume, in collaboration with Angela Rosenthal, entitled Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Danielle Roper
Neubauer Family Assistant in Latin American Literature, University of Chicago
Danielle Roper graduated with a PhD from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University in 2015 where she defended her dissertation, “Inca Drag Queens and Hemispheric Blackface: Contemporary Blackface and Drag performance from the Andes to Jamaica.” Upon completing doctoral studies, she taught as a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at New York University. Roper is from Kingston, Jamaica and has an MA in Performance Studies from NYU and BA in Hispanic Studies (cum laude) from Hamilton College. Her research on Performance Studies, Caribbean Queer and Feminist Studies, Race and Visual Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean has appeared in e-misférica, as well as in anthologies with University of the West Indies Press and with Palgrave Macmillan Press.
Cécile Fromont
Associate Professor in History of Art, Yale University
Cécile Fromont is an associate professor in the history of art department at Yale University. Her writing and teaching focus on the visual, material, and religious culture of Africa and Latin America with a special emphasis on the early modern period (ca 1500-1800) and on the Portuguese-speaking Atlantic World. Her first book, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo was published in 2014 by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute for Early American History. It won a College Art Association Millard Meiss Publication Fund Grant, was named the American Academy of Religion’s 2015 Best First Book in the History of Religions, received the 2015 Albert J. Raboteau Book Prize for the Best Book in Africana Religions, and an honorable mention for the 2015 Melville J. Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association. It has been translated into French by Les Presses du Réel in 2018. She is the editor as well as a contributor to the 2018 volume Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition published in the Africana Religion Series at Penn State University Press. Her essays on African and Latin American art have appeared, among other venues, in the Colonial Latin American Review, African Arts, Anais do Museu Paulista, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics as well as various edited volumes and exhibition catalogues.
Francisco Florez Bolivar
Profesor del Programa de Historia, Universidad de Cartagena
Historiador de la Universidad de Cartagena (2004), Master of Arts (2011), Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies (2015), y Ph. D. en Historia de la Universidad de Pittsburgh, Estados Unidos, (2016). Su investigación doctoral se ocupó de analizar los esfuerzos de sectores afrocolombianos por materializar el ideal de igualdad entre 1885 y 1945. Actualmente, trabaja como profesor de tiempo completo en el Programa de Historia y Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Humanas de la Universidad de Cartagena, y recientemente co-editó, junto al investigador Alberto Abello Vives, el libro Los desterrados del paraíso. Raza, pobreza y cultura en Cartagena de Indias.