GRADUATE STUDENTS

Good News and Congratulations!

Debbie Bensadon will join the Department of Comparative Cultures at Eckerd College in fall, 2009, as Assistant Professor of Spanish. (18 II 2009)

Rubén Sánchez-Godoy has accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at Southern Methodist University, starting in the fall 2009 semester. (16 II 2009)

Student Directory

A-F / G-P / R-Z

Raquel Alfaro
Raquel Alfaro received her licenciature degree in Latin American literature from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (Bolivia). She wrote a thesis for that degree which offered a critical approach to the poetry and narratives of Bolivian Jaime Saenz and focused on the ethical proposal referring to relations with otherness (Andean indigenous cultures) posed by these literary works. Currently she is a Mellon Fellow. Raquel is in her fourth year of the Hispanic Languages and Literatures Ph.D. program and working on her Ph.D. dissertation, “Borroneando y chachareando: modos siniestros de po-etizar.” Her interests are related to Andean, cultural and postcolonial studies. 

Francisco Javier Avilés
Francisco Javier Avilés received his BA from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras (1997) and his MA from the State University of New York, Binghamton (2000), both in comparative literature. He has published articles and reviews in all the major newspapers and magazines in Puerto Rico. Currently he is a film and book reviewer for both Plural and Entorno. He was an editor for Editorial del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, as well as for “Zona Cultural,” the art and cultural section of Diálogo, the monthly newspaper of the Universidad de Puerto Rico. His poetry received honorary mentions in the national poetry contest sponsored by El Nuevo Día, in both 2000 and 2002. He has edited a generation X anthology Expresiones (2003) and two Concha Meléndez Prize-winning essays: La isla y su envés: representaciones de lo nacional en el ensayo dominicano contemporáneo by Néstor Rodríguez (2004) and Melancólicas inquisiciones: lectura y sujeto en Borges by Lena Burgos-Lafuente (2006). At present, he is in his first year of the PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is working on different notions of time, history and the present and the way in which these categories interrelate in narrative texts of the Caribbean region. He is especially interested in the works of Puerto Rican writer Eduardo Lalo and Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte and the way these authors reconceptualize the art of writing as a digging among the ruins. For this critical enterprise, Avilés is interested in the reading of Walter Benjamin’s “bare life” as found in the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Paul Virilio and Ricardo Forster.

fja1@pitt.edu

Debbie Bensadon
Debbie Bensadon completed her BA in Spanish with a minor in Psychology at the University of Washington (2000), and her MA in Spanish at the University of Arizona (2005).  She is currently in the last year of her doctoral studies working on her dissertation, “Modernity and Crisis: The Writing of the “Jew” in 20th Century Trans-Atlantic Literature.”  Her work examines the narrative function of literary representations of “Jewishness” in portrayals of the Inquisition (Spain, Mexico, Portugal and Brazil) and dictatorships (Spain, Argentina) that resort to the figure of the Jew as an allegory or metaphor for national, political and historical purposes.  She plans to complete her Ph.D in Latin American Literature with a minor in Brazilian Literature and a certificate in Latin American Studies in April of 2009.

Her teaching interests include 19th and 20th century Peninsular, Spanish American and Brazilian Literature, Literary Theory and Spanish and elementary French. 

Debbie's conference presentations include: “Utopía y modernidad: Fracaso perpetuo en A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes,” LAJSA (Latin American Jewish Studies Association), 2007; “¿Judío o no judío lo suficiente? Religiosidad y autenticidad en A estranha nação de Rafael Mendes,” LASA, Montreal, 2007; “Crisis y Recuerdo: Simbolismos y representaciones de lo judío en Tiempo de silencio,” University of Puerto Rico, 2008; “Cancer and “Jewishness”: The Narrative Function of the Jew in Luis Martín Santos’ Tiempo de silencio,” MMLA (Midwestern Modern Languages Association), Milwaukee in November of 2008.

Awards and Grants: Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures Outstanding TA of the year (2008), Center of Latin American Studies Summer Field Research Grant (2007), Latin American Jewish Studies Association Research Travel Grant (2007).

dab74@pitt.ed

Hannah Aileen Burdette
Hannah Aileen Burdette received her MA in Hispanic literature from Vanderbilt University (2008) and her BA in Spanish with a minor in music from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (2005).  Her current research interests focus on subaltern studies, specifically the representation of indigenous people and the role of the intellectual in indigenismo, testimonio, and political/revolutionary discourse.  She has also worked extensively with the Hispanic immigrant community through the Tennessee Migrant Education Program.  In 2007 she received a Foreign Language Area Scholarship (Vanderbilt) and the Phi Beta Kappa Josephine Hege Award (UNCG) to study Brazilian culture and advanced Portuguese in Rio de Janeiro for six weeks, and she has also traveled to Mexico and Ecuador.  Other awards include the Miguel Enguídanos Award for excellence in graduate research (Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Vanderbilt, 2008) and the Outstanding Graduating Senior Award (Department of Romance Languages, UNCG, 2006).

hab44@pitt.edu

Alejandra Canedo
Alejandra Canedo received her licenciatura in literature from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia. She has an M.A. in Latin American literature and cultural studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research interests relate to female writing and its ethics in the realm of the sacred. Her main focus is on the works of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector and Bolivian author Yolanda Bedregal. Currently she is working toward her PhD, in her fourth year at the University of Pittsburgh.

Alessandra Chiriboga Holzheu 
Alessandra Chiriboga received a BA in literature and philosophy from the Rafael Landívar University in Guatemala City, Guatemala.  Her research interests include 20th-century Latin American literature, Central American Avant-Garde, as well as Latin American cultural studies.

Mauricio Duarte
Mauricio Duarte completed his undergraduate studies at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and later received his MA from Arizona State University, where he worked on the poetics of Teatro Libre in Colombia. In 2005, he joined the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures PhD program at the University of Pittsburgh. At this time, Mauricio Duarte is a doctoral candidate with a concentration in twentieth century written and visual cultures of the Andean region. He is also writing his dissertation, “Contra-narrativas del paisaje andino,” in which he is attempting to invalidate the idea of a total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism by using a decolonialization of the notion of landscape and the experience of nature. He is currently teaching at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Carolina Gainza
Carolina Gainza received both her BA in sociology and an MA in Latin American studies from the University of Chile in 2006. Currently she is in her second year of the Hispanic Languages and Literatures Ph.D. program. Her research interests are related to the field of cultural studies, principally focused on new technologies (Internet), socio-cultural networks, social movements and identities, literature and technology, as well as the relation between discourses and collective action, power and knowledge and postcolonial theories. Her latest publications include Beyond the technology: the free software movement in Latin America (2007); The eternal search for development. The information society and the technological fallacy in Latin America (2006); Actores sociales y sociedad de la información: ¿hacia una sociedad sin sujetos? (2006); ¿Hacia el surgimiento de un nuevo espacio de sentido identitario?. Los procesos de construcción identitaria y las nuevas tecnologías de la comunicación y de la información en América Latina (2006); Dinámicas de exclusión e inclusión en América Latina (2006, with Alejandra Botinelli and Juan Pablo Iglesias).

Gerardo Gómez Michel
Gerardo Gómez Michel received his BA from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana, Mexico, and his MA from the University of Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain. He is currently in the process of writing his dissertation, La letra hereje. Iglesia, fe y religiosidad en la literatura mexicana contemporánea. He expects to complete the PhD program of Hispanic Languages and Literatures with a minor in Peninsular literature in April, 2009.  His research and teaching interests include 19th and 20th century Latin American literature, Mexican literature from the colonial to the contemporary periods, literary representations of religion and its relationship with national discourses. Throughout these topics he explores the conflict between identity and subjectivity in modern Latin America.

He has a certificate in Scriptwriting and Production of Radio Programs from the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and Radio Educación, Mexico and is completing a Certificate in Latin American Studies from the Center for Latin American Studies of the University of Pittsburgh.

Papers presented at conferences include: “La construcción de una subjetividad migrante en el contexto del mercado mundial del siglo XVII en los Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez”, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras, 2008. “Entre Dios, Kukulkan y la llorona: Visiones y tensiones de lo mágico-religioso en la literatura maya yucateca contemporánea”, LASA Conference 2007 (Latin American Studies Association). “La voz del narrador y la presencia judía en Stella Manhattan: poética del cuerpo vs. política del cuerpo en tiempos de la dictadura militar brasileña”, XIII International Conference of  LAJSA (Latin American Jewish Studies Association) 2007. “El artista decadente en De sobremesa de José Asunción Silva: Autocrítica del modernismo en el contexto político de finales del Siglo XIX” LASA Conference 2006.

Publication: "Ejercer el poder desde el encierro: delito y espacio carcelario en dos novelas chilenas, " in John Beverley, Diamela Eltit, et al. Provisoria-mente. Textos para Diamela Eltit. Antonio Gomez, comp. Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo, 2007. 25-34.

geg@pitt.edu / palinuromx@gmail.com

Betina González
Betina González studied Social Communication at the University of Buenos Aires, where she worked as a professor and where she currently participates in research projects about media semiotics. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. In 2006 her first book, Arte menor, won the Clarín Annual Literary Prize for novels. She has also published Juegos de playa, a collection of short stories that was awarded the second prize in the Argentine National Fund for the Arts annual contest (2006).

She is currently working towards her Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research is focused on nineteenth century narratives of war in Latin America.


Koichi Hagimoto
Koichi Hagimoto received his BA in Liberal Arts from Soka University of America (2005) and an MA in Latin American literature with a minor in Brazilian literature from the University of Pittsburgh (2007).  He has been teaching Spanish since 2006, and the Department named him TA Mentor during the academic year 2008-2009.  His academic interests include 19th century Latin American history and literature, colonial/postcolonial theories, and Latin American cultural studies.  He has presented academic papers at various conferences throughout the United States as well as in Cuba and Mexico.   His publications include, “El valor pedagógico ante el imperialismo en el pensamiento de José Martí” in Anuario del Centro de Estudios Martianos (Habana, 2006) and a review of Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (2005) in A Contracorriente (2007). 

He is currently in his fourth year of the doctoral program, working on his dissertation, “Between the Empires: Martí, Rizal and the Rise of Global Resistance.”   His project is a comparative analysis of fin-de-siècle anti-imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines.   By analyzing the writings of José Martí (1853-1895) and José Rizal (1861-1896), he examines the critical possibilities as well as limits of Cuban and Filipino anti-imperial discourse within the larger framework of the 19th-century Hispanic world.  He plans to complete his Ph.D. in the spring of 2010. 

koh2@pitt.edu

Lizardo M Herrera
Lizardo M Herrera received his licenciatura in Latin American history, in 2001, from the Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE, Quito) after defending his thesis, Imagen y teatralidad: medios de control simbólico en la sociedad quiteña del siglo XVII. He continued his studies at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, where he received an MA in Cultural Studies in 2003, upon defending his thesis, Entre el Santo y el Rey: Los festejos organizados en Quito por la canonización de San Raymundo de Peñafort en 1603. He then came to the University of Pittsburgh, where he received a second MA, in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in 2005, and a year later a PhD Certificate in Cultural Studies. During this time he was also the intra-departmental student representative.  At present his interests include the representation of drugs, violence, and marginality in Latin American literature and film (1990s and 2000s) and the debate around the Baroque and Neo-baroque in Latin America.

Becky Klink
Becky Klink received her BA from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2004) where she majored in both the English and Spanish Honors programs.  She was an international exchange student on two different occasions which enabled her to study at La Universidad Autónoma de Nayarit (1999) and La Universidad de Las Americas (2002).  She also participated in the National Student Exchange program which provided her the opportunity to study at the California State University at San Bernardino (2003).  

Becky’s research interests include gender and queer theory, national identity formation, race, and postcolonial theory.  She is also interested in the socio-political legitimization of violence and its relationship to gendered identities.    


Fernando Lanas
Fernando Lanas received his BA from the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Quito, Ecuador, and his MA in Monastic Studies from Saint Vincent Seminary. His current interests include religious narrative in the Andes, and contemporary Latin American political discourse.

Maricarmen León
Maricarmen León tiene un bachillerato en Ciencias de la Comunicación y el grado de licenciada en periodismo de la universidad Femenina del Sagrado Corazón. Realizó periodismo de investigación en diferentes casos políticos y sociales en el Perú.  También elaboró y realizó campañas de instrucción cívica a la población amazónica de su país como parte de un programa integral educativo del poder judicial peruano.  Actualmente, tiene cuatro años de experiencia como instructora de español en la Universidad de Pittsburgh y se encuentra en el segundo año del programa doctoral del departamento de literatura hispánica. Su interés de estudio se perfila en narrativas postmodernas de encierro.

Mildred. F. López 
Mildred F. Lopez graduated from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Peru with a bachelor’s degree in history.  She obtained her M.A. in history and Spanish literature from the University of Connecticut in 2005.  While there, she organized the round table “Andean Cinema,” as part of the VIII Encuentro de Cine Latinoamericano, elcine (Lima-2004), and was an Associate Coordinator of the VI Conference/Festival, Latin American Theatre Today: Translation, Transgender and Transnationalism (Connecticut-2005). Mildred is currently a fourth year PhD student and Teaching Fellow of Intermediate Spanish. Most broadly, her academic interests include Andean migration, music, performance, visual culture, representations, memory, violence and postcolonial theory. Her dissertation will focus on modernity, tradition and the production of new aesthetic forms in a context of violence. Her research addresses these key questions: How, in a context of globalization/modernization, can Andean urban migrants be affected in their re-configuration of the notion of “self?” What frameworks and processes are involved in the production of their aesthetic and knowledge? What are the challenges for postcolonial theory and its re-negotiations in the study of the Andean area? She will discuss three types of texts (literature, music and cinema), using an interdisciplinary approach.  Mildred’s personal interests are social movements, world music, theater, singing, Quechua language, foreign cinema, dance, kickboxing, cooking and outdoor activities.

Fabio López de la Roche
Fabio López de la Roche obtained a BA in history from the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow (Russia) in 1984. In 1993, he earned his “Maestría en Análisis de Problemas Políticos e  Internacionales Contemporáneos” at the Universidad Externado de Colombia in Bogotá. At present, López is a fourth-year graduate student in Hispanic languages and literatures at the University of Pittsburgh.  He is currently on leave from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, where he is Profesor Asociado in the Instituto de Estudios Políticos y Relaciones Internacionales and coordinates the Research Group on “Communication, Culture, and Politics.”  He is a member of the team that, in 2005, created the MA Program in Cultural Studies and also served as Director of the Instituto de Estudios en Comunicación y Cultura (2002-2003).

López de la Roche has written many articles on twentieth century Colombian political and cultural history. Since 1994, he has been working in communication studies and media analysis, integrating interdisciplinary perspectives from political science, communications and journalism to analyze the cultural and political influence of media. His publications include Izquierdas y cultura política. Oposición alternativa?, 1994; Cultura, medios y sociedad (with Jesús Martín-Barbero), 1998;  Modernidad y sociedad política en Colombia, (with Eduardo Pizarro, Miguel Eduardo Cárdenas, et al), 1993; Memoria, museo y nación. Misión de los museos nacionales para los ciudadanos del futuro, (with Gonzalo Sánchez et al.), 2002; "El periodismo: ese relegado objeto de  estudio y de debate ciudadano," in Diálogos de la Comunicación, 66 (Lima) 2003.  He was also the guest editor for a special issue of  Historia Crítica (28 [Bogotá] 2004) that focused on the History of Mass Media and Journalism in Colombia.

Aarti Madan
A doctoral candidate originally from Chattanooga, Tennessee, Aarti Madan has completed an MA in Latin American Literature (2007) as well as a Doctoral Certificate in Cultural Studies (2008) from the University of Pittsburgh. She was a FLAS Fellow for the 2007-2008 academic year and continues her Portuguese study through a second FLAS for 2008-2009. Aarti is a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, where she received a BA in both English and Spanish (2004). While in Birmingham, she also taught English and Spanish at The Arlington School (2003-2005), a small private school designed to cater to each student’s instructional needs.

Currently at work on her dissertation “Writing the Earth, Writing the Nation: Latin American Narrative and the Language of Geography,” Aarti’s doctoral research centers on the representation of land as it first appears in Humboldt and then in Sarmiento, Cunha, and Gallegos. By creating a dialogue between literature and the discipline of geography, she strives to better understand the politics of these authors’ particular aesthetic forms as well the interrelations between land, man, and language as it appears in their foundational texts. Most recently Aarti has published in A Contracorriente (2007) and presented papers at LASA (2007) and the National Women’s Studies Conference (2008). She expects to complete her PhD in the spring of 2010.

aam34@pitt.edu

Nashieli Marcano
Nashieli (K. Leroy Irvis Fellow 2007-2008) holds an MA in Spanish (Bowling Green State University) and an MS in Library and Information Studies (Florida State University).  Among her research interests are cultural and textual studies, as well as Caribbean literatures.  During her previous position as Assistant Professor of Bibliography (University of Akron), Nashieli taught courses on information literacy and research methods.   She co-directed the 12th Annual Latino Issues Conference at BGSU and has served as moderator and rapporteur at the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials annual conferences. Publications include articles in the AURCO Journal, SALALM Papers, Hispanic American Biographies and Encyclopedia of the Caribbean.

Nashieli divides her time between her studies in Pittsburgh and her two young sons and husband who are living in Ohio. 

http://textereblog.blogspot.com/
nam36@pitt.edu

Citlali Martínez
Citlali Martínez completed her BA in Visual Arts at Brown University (2002) with a focus on mixed media and installation, and has completed her MA in Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh (2006) along with Ph.D. certificates in Cultural Studies and Latin American Studies.

In her dissertation,”Performance as Cultural Critique: Latin American Women Artists and the Restaging of Hemispheric Experience,” she addresses the state of contemporary ‘experience’ by examining the multifaceted work of female performance artists from the Caribbean, Mexico and Latino United States. She proposes that performance art’s inclusive posture toward diverse artistic and conceptual practices and experiences makes it a unique and dynamic medium through which to address the cultural and social challenges that characterize our time and place in history.  Other areas of interest include the politics and theory of translation, issues in women’s writing, and ritual resistance processes in art and literature.

She is currently in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on the completion of her Ph.D.

citlali.martinez@gmail.com.

Arturo Matute Castro
Arturo Matute Castro received a BA (Journalism) from the Universidad de La Habana in 1994, and an MA (Hispanic Linguistics) in 2000. Interested in literary and cultural studies, especially those that address political and religious discourse in Latin America, he is particularly interested in studying contemporary Latin American literature and intellectual history from a post-colonial perspective, using criteria from gender and queer theory.

Emily Metz  
Emily Metz’s interests include children’s literature, childhood studies, memory, mediation, temporality, Andean literature, and indigenous studies.  In her dissertation, “Unburying the Child: Writing Childhood in Andean Literature,” she will explore the ambiguous terrain of the construction of indigeneity and the role of children in the formation, recuperation, and interrogation of indigenous identity.  While studying at the University of Pittsburgh, Emily has taught the courses Latin America Today, Spanish 0001, and Spanish 0002.

Emily plans to complete her Ph.D. in Latin American Literature with certificates in Latin American and Cultural Studies in the spring of 2010.  With a committee of graduate students from the department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, she helped establish the graduate student lecture series Interdisciplinary Ink (2008).  Emily studied Aymara as a FLAS fellow (Foreign Language Area Studies) in 2007-2008.  She completed her M.A. in Latin American literature at the University of Pittsburgh (2007) and received her BA in Spanish from Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, where she was the Outstanding Arts and Humanities graduate (2002).

Prior to studying at the University of Pittsburgh, Emily practiced Aymara on Isla Titicaca (Isla del Sol) in Bolivia where she taught English (2005).  She also served as an AmeriCorps VISTA in beautiful Bluff, Utah (2003-2004).  As a VISTA, she wrote grants for community programs and organized elementary school activities.  With interests in both Central and South America, she has spent time in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia.

http://www.emilynoelmetz.blogspot.com/
enc7@pitt.edu

Sarah Soanirina Ohmer
With an MA in Spanish literatures (2006) and a BA with Honors in Spanish and English linguistics (2004), both from the University of Houston, Sarah’s interests include contemporary Mexican, U.S. Hispanic, and Caribbean literature; U.S. Third World Feminism (or Feminism of Color), postcolonial, and psychoanalytical theories, as well as ethnography. Her interdisciplinary work explores the healing and decolonizing potential of women’s narratives.

Previous works: Honors thesis “Juan Rulfo’s Glocal Serendity, From el Más Allá, Jusqu’ici” (2004); M.A. thesis “La función curativa de los textos literarios de Patricia Laurent Kullick, Gloria Fuertes and Gloria Anzaldúa.”

Published work: “El Camino de de Santiago, de Patricia Laurent Kullick: Abordajes visuales y psicoanalíticos, una posibilidad de vida” (Apuntes Hispánicos http://www.spanport.utoronto.ca/apuntes/revista.html); “Escritura, violencia y poder en ‘Prometheus Bound’: algunas reflexiones sobre performance en una entrevista con Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya.” (Osamayor 8-18).

Sarah also acted in and directed plays with Et Voila Theatre in Houston, a non-profit organization that promotes the French language through the theatre arts.www.etvoilatheatre.org

sso7@pitt.edu

George Palacios
George Palacios, a native of Colombia, holds an MA in foreign languages and literatures —Latin American literatures— from Purdue University (2004). He has been pursuing his doctoral studies since the fall of 2006. His broad research interests encompass the literatures, cultures, philosophy and political thought related to the African diaspora in the Americas. He is particularly interested in the relations between Afro-Hispanic (i.e., Colombia, Central America, the Caribbean islands) and African-American literatures and cultures (i.e., the Harlem Renaissance).

gep10@pitt.edu

Rafael Ponce-Cordero
Rafael Ponce-Cordero is from Guayaquil, Ecuador and is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He received a B.A. in journalism (2000) and an M.A. in Latin American history (2004) from the University of Seville, where he carried out research for his master’s thesis at the Archivo General de Indias. Most recently, in 2005, he received his M.A. in Latin American literature and cultural studies with a minor concentration in Peninsular literature from the University of Pittsburgh. Ponce-Cordero has received a graduate certificate from the Center for Latin American Studies and will soon finish the requirements for his Cultural Studies graduate certificate. He has conducted research in Ecuador and Spain, and plans to do the same in Mexico in the near future. His interests include 20^th-century Latin American narrative (especially boom and post-boom), Latin American cultural studies (for example soap operas and popular music, among other phenomena), and a variety of Latin American literary and theoretical debates (particularly postcolonial and subaltern studies). At present, Ponce-Cordero is working on his doctoral dissertation, which focuses on the figure of the popular hero in Latin America and its treatment in literature and pop culture, and will include real-life and fictional icons such as Julio Jaramillo, Daniel Santos, Santo el Enmascarado de Plata, Kalimán, El Chapulín Colorado, Ernesto Che Guevara, Diego Armando Maradona, and the narcos and guapos de barrio of narcocorrido and reggaetón.

Roberto Ponce-Cordero
Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador, Roberto Ponce-Cordero received his Magister in History, North American Literature and Media Theory from the University of Hamburg (Germany) in 2006. As a second year graduate student in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures, his interests include transculturation and transnationalism, the marking of “Latin American” identity, queer theory, and the construction of specific Latin American masculinities especially through literature and film, but also through other discourses such as sports, popular entertainment and political writings.   

Bernardo Rocco
Bernardo Rocco is in his second year as a doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures. He obtained a BA in Hispanic languages and literatures from the University of Chile (2000) and an MA at Temple University, Philadelphia (2006). His research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American literature, critical theory, and Latin American studies. He is also interested in representation, marginality, borderlands, and violence in Latin American narratives. He recently published his first book of poetry, book Maquina (Peru, 2007).

Carolina Rueda
Carolina Rueda received an MA in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of Cincinnati in August 2007.

Previously, she worked professionally in the fields of film and video. In 1999, while living in San Francisco, she co-founded LatinEyes, a television program that focuses on Latino culture in such a way as to break down the stereotyped images of Hispanic people living in the US. LatinEyes received an Emmy Award for Best Cultural TV Show in 2006 (San Francisco, California).Carolina has also participated in the creation of several documentaries and films. She is co-producer of Visitas, a film directed by Venezuelan director, Pedro Lange. In this production, she was in charge of the camera and was editing operator. In 2006, Visitas was exhibited at several international film festivals including the Festival des Films du Monde (Montréal), the Internationale Filmfestival Freiburg (Switzerland), the Chicago Latino Film Festival, the Festival de cine de Granada (Spain), and Cine Las Américas (Austin, Texas).

At the doctoral level, Carolina is currently working on the analysis of new approaches in Latin American cinema, especially after the year 2000; this includes the identification of new relationships between film and culture and the links connecting esthetics and socio-political content.

Maria del Carmen Saldarriaga
Maria Saldarriaga received her B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Colombia (2001), after which she earned an M.A. in Social Psychology of Groups and Institutions from the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico (2005). Her master’s thesis, “Colombia Expatriada: Refracción de la Imagen de sí,” focused on the idea of a continuous reconstruction of migrant subjectivity and its ways of naming it.

She joined the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures as a Ph.D. student in fall 2008. Here she expects to explore concepts like deviation and abnormality which are attributed to the subject in twentieth century Latin American literature.

mas307@pitt.edu

Rubén Sánchez-Godoy
Rubén Sánchez-Godoy is a doctoral candidate and an Andrew Mellon/University of Pittsburgh Pre-doctoral Fellow, 2008-09. He has received an MA (2006), a Doctoral Certificate in Cultural Studies (2008), and a Graduate Certificate in Latin American Studies (2008), all from the University of Pittsburgh. In addition, he has a BA in Theology (1994) and a BA in Philosophy (1991), both from the Javeriana University in Bogotá, Colombia.

In his doctoral studies, he has focused on literary theory, the figure of the intellectual, and the presence of racial issues in the Latin American literary canon and some cultural productions. He has been particularly concerned about the way in which literature and cultural production can work to either reinforce or challenge racial stereotypes and practices. As a consequence of these academic interests, he is currently working on his dissertation in which he explores, from a transatlantic perspective, some representations of enslaved Africans in Iberian America produced by missionaries who criticized slavery during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He considers the study of these representations relevant in order to identify (1) the ways in which Iberian conquerors and colonizers tried to justify slavery, (2) the questions that slavery posed for Iberian colonization projects in the Americas, (3) the emergence of early forms of knowledge and government based on racial issues in Iberian America, and (4) race as an ideology that supported both the subjugation of and the fight for freedom engaged in by Africans and their descendants in Iberian America.

From 1994 to 2004, he taught courses in Continental Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Seventeenth Century Thought at both the Javeriana and the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He published several articles on these topics, including “El cuerpo al interior de una ontología histórica de nosotros mismos” (in Perspectivas sobre el cuerpo. Madrid: UNED, 2001), “El yo entre la regularización y la singularidad” (in El cuerpo, fábrica del yo. Bogotá: CEJA, 2005), and “Sometimiento y deformación en la obra de Luis Caballero y Lorenzo Jaramillo.” More recently, he has worked on Michel Foucault’s concept of bio-politics. He is interested in establishing the specificity of this concept, and how to use it for approaching some contemporary political processes. As part of these explorations, he was co-author and editor of the book Biopolítica y formas de vida (Bogotá: CEJA, 2007).

Parker Shaw
Parker Shaw's current academic interests and work are based in postcolonial theory and cultural studies, with particular attention to Latin America. Within postcolonial theory he is concerned with: rhetorical forms of domination; deconstructing claims of cultural/political innocence or benevolence, including analysis of justification, the discursive resistance to domination such as the testimonial genre, and progressive dialogue with the constructed Other. His interests within cultural studies include mass media-generated discourse, popular travel writing, and Third World popular music as a subaltern voice.

Much of his previous work explores these ideas, and he is currently revising two papers for submission. In “Leaving Babylon: Reggae as an Ideological Exodus,” he situates socially committed Jamaican reggae music in relation to the revolutionary process of the “native intellectual” described by Frantz Fanon. In “Cumandá: A Fiction Between Evangelization and Colonization,” he challenges the notion that the early missions of South America provided indigenous peoples with an escape from the abuses of conquest and colonization, arguing rather that the mission effort was a rhetorically-disguised means of colonial appropriation.

Leah Strobel
With the support of a Mellon Fellowship, Leah Strobel is currently completing her dissertation entitled “Can Silence Speak? Reading the Invisiblized Woman in Three Narratives of Female Development.”  Her current research interests include race and identity in twentieth-century women’s writing, Brazilian literature, and colonial/postcolonial theories.  In Summer 2008 she was awarded a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship (Title VI), by the University’s Center for Latin American Studies, allowing her to travel to Recife, Brazil, where she attended courses in Portuguese and Literary Theory at the Faculdade de Olinda.  In 2006-2007, the Department named her Teaching Mentor for incoming Teaching Assistants, and she was named a Teaching Fellow in Women’s Studies during the Fall 2007-Spring 2008 term, during which she developed and taught two Introduction to Women’s Studies undergraduate courses.  She has participated in various scholarly conferences, most recently invited to present her work “Mi Hija, Sepa su Lugar: Autoidentificación y Reeducación en As três Marias de Rachel de Queiroz,” at the March 2008 graduate student conference at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. 

Fluent in both Portuguese and Spanish, she received her M.A. in Foreign Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2004, and expects to complete the requirements for her Ph.D. in May 2009. She is also working on graduate certificates in Latin American Studies and Studies in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. 

lls14@pitt.edu

Kristin Tolbert
Kristin Renee Tolbert is a second year student originally from New York City.  As the founding president of InterdisciplinaryInk: A Latin American Lecture Series, Kristin aims to bridge the gaps between the many graduate students interested in Latin American issues not only from within the language and literature departments but throughout all of the School of Arts and Sciences.  She is currently teaching one session of Spanish 0001 and focuses her studies on the aesthetic representations of women of color in contemporary Spanish-Caribbean literature.

Fernando Toledo S.
Fernando Toledo received a B.A. in Hispanic languages and literatures from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. His current research is focused on the relations between war and literature in Peru.

Gina Villamizar
Gina received her BA in Modern Languages from the Universidad del Atlántico in Colombia. Her research project involved the analysis of Caribbean identity and culture in the literary work of Colombian writer José Félix Fuenmayor. She obtained her MA in Hispanic Literature at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville where she studied Peninsular Literature. She joined the department of Hispanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh in the fall of 2007 and her current research interest are transatlantic studies with an emphasis on the Caribbean and Spain.

César Zamorano
César Zamorano received his Bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a Master’s degree in contemporary philosophy at the University of Valparaíso, Chile. His research was focused on subjectivities and relationships of power in authors like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. At present, he is in his first year of study at the University of Pittsburgh where he continues his research in Latin American studies and cultural studies, focusing on different kinds of subjectivities and their relationships with social, political and cultural structures in Latin America.

Jorge Zavaleta
Jorge Zavaleta is in his third year in the department.  He received an MA from the University of Pittsburgh (2007) and a BA in Hispanic literature from Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.

His specific interests include the relationships between film and literature in works such as those of Manuel Puig.  He is also interested in the novels of the “boom” in their diverse manifestations and themes, and the influence of audiovisual media in the definition of a new and surprising popular culture in the face of globalization. The recent success of the new Latin American film around the world is an important issue for a research project that he began working on this year.

Jorge has also studied journalism, film, publicity and political analysis at different institutions, including IDEA in Caracas.  He has published essays and articles in the principal newspapers and specialized journals of Lima, as well as in Latin American publications (Letralia, Proyecto, Patrimonio, Butaca, Godard!, Uno más Uno).

He has also worked for the news agencies Notimex (Mexico) and DPA (Germany).  He has authored a novel, Católicas (Lima, Jaime Campodónico Editor, 1998), and an essay, “El cine en el Perú: ¿La luz al final del túnel?,” included in Literatura peruana hoy: crisis y creación (Catholic University of Eichstätt, Germany). This year, one of his short stories will be published in Apuntes Hispánicos, an academic review from University of Toronto.

joz5@pitt.edu

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