LIZABETH PARAVISINI-GEBERT is a Professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Environmental Studies Program at Vassar College, where she holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in Comparative Literature from New York University. Prof. Paravisini-Gebert is the author of Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (with Margarite Fernández Olmos, 2003; 2nd ed. 2011), Literatures of the Caribbean (2008) and of the forthcoming Extinctions: The Ecological Cost of Colonization in the Caribbean and Lost Paris of the West Indies: Creative Responses to the 1902 Eruption of Martinique’s Mont Pelée Volcano. She is at work on Troubled Sea: Ecology and History in 21st Century Caribbean Art and on Parrot of the Caribbean: An Environmental Biography.
Ms. Paravisini-Gebert has co-edited a number of collections of essays, most notably Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures (2008). Her critical editions of texts by Caribbean women writers include Phyllis Allfrey’s The Orchid House (1997) and It Falls Into Place: The Short Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey (2004). Her articles and literary translations have appeared in the Yale French Review, the Yale Review, Callaloo, the Journal of West Indian Literature, the Jean Rhys Review, the Journal of Caribbean Literature, Obsidian, and the Revista Mexicana del Caribe, among others.
Ms. Paravisini-Gebert’s blog on Caribbean culture and the arts, which she co-writes with Ivette Romero-Cesareo of Marist College, can be found at http://repeatingislands.com/.
MICHAEL ARONNA is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and the Program of Latinx and Latin American Studies at Vassar College. He has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature from the University of Pittsburgh, an M.A. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from SUNY, Stony Brook.
Aronna is the author of ‘Pueblos enfermos’: The Discourse of Illness in the Turn-of-the-Century Spanish and Latin American Essay (University of North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literatures). He is the co-editor and translator with John Beverley and José Oviedo of The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Duke University Press) and the co-editor with José Colmeiro of Perspectivas Transátlanticas: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán y Latinoamérica, MVM: Cuadernos de estudios Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. His published articles and book chapters concern the relationship between scientific discourse, racial profiling and national identity, testimonial narrative, and the ideological legacy of the Battle of Lepanto of 1571 in contemporary geopolitical and biopolitical discourse. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Hispanic Cartographies of Orientalism: The Literary Mapping of ‘Just Wars,’ Ethnic Cleansing and the War on Terror.
Michael Aronna has taught courses in colonial and modern Latin American cultural history, including “The Natural and Moral History of the Spanish Empire,” “The Utopia of Latin America,” “Screening the Past: Filmic Adaptations of Latin American Colonial Society,” “Science Fiction, Horror and the Occult in Latin America,” and “Detective Fiction in Latin America.”
NICOLÁS M. VIVALDA is an Associate Professor of Spanish culture and literature in the department of Hispanic studies. He received a BA in Literature from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario (Argentina) and a MA, and a PhD in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Pittsburgh.
His research and publications include Golden Age Peninsular novel and theatre, contemporary Latin American and Spanish prose, and trans-Atlantic perspectives on Golden Age Peninsular topics such as the Latin American recreation of the Spanish Picaresque novel traditio He is the author of Del Atalaya a los límites de Faetón: Narrar la experiencia cognitiva en el barroco hispánico (Scripta Humanistica 2015).
He is currently working on a series of articles closely linked to his dissertation (“Picaresca y modos de la alegoría en La vida de Guzmán de Alfarache. Atalaya de la vida humana” and “Basilio o el ocaso del monarca astrólogo: juegos de la similitud en La vida es sueño”). Among the courses taught by Mr. Vivalda are “Framing Poverty and Social Mobility: the Picaresque Novel in Spain and Latin America” and “Postmodern Sexual Identities in Post-Franco Spain.”
EVA WOODS PEIRÓ is a Professor of Hispanic Studies at Vassar College. She has authored and co-edited two books and numerous articles on cinema in Spain between the 1920s and the present. Her current projects focus on Spanish film magazines of the 1920s and 30s and contemporary Trans-Atlantic digital cinema with particular attention to issues of surveillance and migration. She has taught and mentored in the Media, Latin American and Latinx, Women’s and International Studies Programs. In addition to chairing and directing her department and multi-disciplinary programs and serving on several committees, her community-campus service has involved chairing the Engaged Pluralism’s working group, Bridging Local and Global Communities; organizing Undoing Racism workshops; teaching Building Inclusive Communities with Latinx Poughkeepsie; and incorporating Conversations Unbound in her Hispanic Studies courses since 2017. She is a member of Poughkeepsie ENJAN (End the New Jim Crow Action Network), a founding member of the Poughkeepsie-Oaxaca City Friendship Committee Initiative, and a member of the Complete Count Census Committee. She has served as an officer on the Arlington School District PTA and is currently a member of their Equity Team.
EDUARDO RODRÍGUEZ SANTIAGO is From 2018 to 2020 he was the Spanish Language Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Vassar, where he now teaches as an adjunct instructor. He has a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies and an M.A. in Translation from the University of Puerto Rico. His literary and academic translations have appeared in Sargasso: A Journal of Caribbean Literature, Language & Culture; his short story “HR” was recently featured in the fourth edition of the Vassar Review.
KENDAL SIMMONS, class of 2023, is from New Jersey and majoring in Hispanic Studies and Anthropology. She was the Ford scholar for the Oviedo Project during the Summer of 2020 and continues to work for the Project as a Research Assistant.
ABIGAIL HOUTON is a rising junior from the Bronx, New York. She is majoring in Sociology and Studio Art with plans to pursue a correlate in Hispanic Studies. Abbie is the current Ford scholar for the Oviedo Project for the summer of 2022, and is excited to study in Madrid this coming fall.