Unpacking Quiroga’s Files 2025 Speakers
Meet the Panelists
Professor | The University of Texas, Austin | Spanish and Portuguese / African and African Diaspora Studies
Paper: José Quiroga: Writing, Memorialization, Caribeñidad
Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez, is Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures at The University of Texas, Austin. She specializes in Afro-Diasporic cultures, media studies, intersectionality and colonial and post-colonial studies. She is author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil, (2003; 2020); Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (2013) and Caribes 2.0: New Media, Globzalization and the Afterlives of Disaster (2023). She has been awarded grants from the Mellon and the Ford Foundation.
Mellon Professor Emeritus | University of Pittsburgh | Spanish and Portuguese
Paper: The Making of Sexualidades en disputa
Daniel Balderston is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages Emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh. Co-director of the Borges Center and of its journal Variaciones Borges, he is the author six monographs on Borges and the editor of a dozen more. Recent publications include Leído primero y escrito después: Aproximaciones a las obras de Augusto Roa Bastos, Ricardo Piglia y Juan José Saer (Eduvim, 2020), El método Borges (Ampersand, 2021) and Lo marginal es lo más bello (Eudeba, 2022). With Nora Benedict he edited the Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges (2024), and with Alfredo Alonso Estenoz, Mariela Blanco, Emron Esplin and María Celeste a selection of Borges’s notes for his talks and courses from 1949 to 1954, Cuadernos & Conferencias (2024). Recent critical editions include Vidas escandalosas: Antología de la diversidad sexual en la literatura latinoamericana de 1850 a 1950 (IILI, 2021, with Claudia Salazar Jiménez and Ricardo Vázquez Díaz), Otto Miguel Cione’s Luxuria, la vida nocturna en Buenos Aires (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, 2022, with Carlos Halaburda) and Augusto D’Halmar’s Pasión y muerte del cura Deusto (Biblioteca Chilena, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2023, with Daniela Buksdorf).
Professor | Enory University | Religion and Comparative Literature
Paper: In the Woods, with Rafi Trelles, Agustín Stahl, and José Quiroga
I read and write about interactions between plants and humans and the impact of those correspondences in matters of artistic, philosophical, and scientific thought, and of history and coloniality. I have published on mysticism, architecture, law, and theatre in early modern Spain and Latino America.
Assistant Professor of Latinx Literature | Central Connecticut State University | Department of English
Paper: Archival Reunions: A Mentee’s First Encounters with the José Quiroga Papers.
Born and raised in Miami, I am a scholar, poet, and educator working in the fields of Latinx and Caribbean literature and visual culture. I currently serve as Assistant Professor of Latinx Literature in the Department of English at Central Connecticut State University, and I received my PhD from the Comparative Literature Department at Emory University. The courses I teach engage ethnic studies, feminist and queer theory, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and trauma and memory studies.
My current book project is a comparative study on literary and artistic representations of Cuban and Haitian sea migration. This research grows partly out of my 2023 dissertation, Subjects Adrift, which considers “drifting” figures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Caribbean texts.
My recent publications include “Art, Relic, or Refuse? The Abject Exhibition of the Cuban Raft and Its Literary Afterlife in the Fiction of Achy Obejas” (in Latino Studies) and “Mimicking Seas and Malefic Mirrors in Suzanne Césaire: An Ecopoetic Theory of Caribbean Subjectivity” (in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism). Other scholarly and pedagogical projects have been featured in the Smithsonian Learning Lab and the National Humanities Center’s digital library for educators.
My poetry chapbook Flight is a meditation on the multigenerational effects of migration and feminine embodiment, and is available from Volumes Volumes. More of my poems and other critical writings appear in Denver Quarterly, VOLT, Art Practical, Jai-Alai Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, and sx salon.
Asst. Professor of Afro-Latinx Issues & Social Movements | Bucknell University | Latin American, Latinx, and Caribbean Studies
Paper: Recuerdos olvidables: On Afro-Cuban Diasporic Identities and the ruins of memory
Aisha Cort Hamilton, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Afro-Latinx Studies and Social Movements in the Latin American Studies Program at Bucknell University. She earned her BA in Spanish from Yale University, and her MA and PhD in Spanish Literature from Emory University. Her research focuses on Afro-Latinx and Latinx film, literature, and cultural production, with a specialization in Afro-Cuban cultural production. She is the author of the forthcoming monograph, Representing Race in Revolutionary Cuba: Afrocubanía, negrometraje, and cultural production, 1961-1996 (SUNY Press, Fall 2026)
Poet, critic and playwright, also known as a LGBTIQ+ activist | Teatro El Público
Paper: José Quiroga: cartografía de una isla diferida
Poet, critic and playwright, also known as a LGBTIQ+ activist. Author of several books of poetry, essays, plays, is the dramatic advisor of Teatro El Público in Havana, since 2001. His poems and other texts appears in several anthologies, published in Cuba and other nations. He was the first Cuban writer on the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa. He has been collaborating with the Royal Court Theater in London, and with companies as Teatro SEA, in New York, and also writing for production as Cintas de Seda, in Perú and Chicago, and Carmen La Cubana, premiered in Paris in 2016. His most recent book is Queer Cuban Nation (Tilde Editores, Monterrey, Mexico, 2024). His latest play, Un Domingo Llamado Deseo opened in Havana, directed by him, in September.
Professor | New York University | Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures
Paper: Lines of Flight/Líneas de fuga
Licia Fiol-Matta grew up in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She received an AB from Princeton University and a PhD from Yale University, both in Comparative Literature. Prior to joining NYU she taught at Barnard College and the City University of New York. Fiol-Matta teaches courses on feminism in the Americas; modern and contemporary Latin American literature, film and art; and music and popular culture.
Fiol-Matta has published two monographs: the critically acclaimed and widely influential A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minnesota; translation forthcoming from Editorial Palinodia, Chile) and the award-winning The Great Woman Singer: Gender and Voice in Puerto Rican Music (Duke; translation forthcoming from Editorial Callejón, Puerto Rico). She is co-editor, with José Quiroga, of the series New Directions in Latino American Cultures (Palgrave), with over 50 cutting-edge titles on Latin American and Latinx literature, gender, sexualities, race, film, art, and popular culture. Fiol-Matta’s recent work has appeared in the edited volumes Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class, and the Unconscious; Critical Terms in Latin American and Caribbean Thought (translation Términos críticos en el pensamiento caribeño y latinoamericano); and Cocinando suave: ensayos de salsa en Puerto Rico. Peer-reviewed publications have appeared more recently in Current Musicology, Radical History Review, PMLA, Papel máquina, and women and performance.
Fiol-Matta has received various grants and awards over the course of her career, among them from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has served on the Board of Directors of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York; the Editorial Board of Social Text; the Advisory Boards of Nomadías (Chile) and Revista Hispánica Moderna (New York); and, currently, the Editorial Board of Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (St. Louis).
Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies | University of Wisconsin La Crosse | Global Cultures and Languages
Paper: Aun buscando a Caín/Still Searching for Caín
Dr. Omar Granados is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. His research focuses on cultural approaches to migration and the collective memory of transnational communities. He has published numerous academic articles on Cuban and Cuban American culture and is the creator of Uprooted, an interactive, multifaceted public project (digital archive, podcast, and public exhibit) that examines immigration detention during the 1980 Mariel Exodus across U.S. military bases. At UWL, Dr. Granados also serves as Director of the Institute for Latin American and Latino Studies.
Assistant Professor | Duke University | Literature
Paper: Literature as that Space: Disappearance’s Pedagogy and Quiroga’s Reading Practice
Christina A. León is Assistant Professor of Literature at Duke University. She specializes in literary, anticolonial, critical race, feminist, and queer theories, with a concentration on Latinx and Caribbean literature, art, and thought. Her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay of materiality and semiosis to better theorize and attend to works by authors and artists who often become known only through their identificatory markers, overdetermined by grammars of race and gender. She is the author of Matters of Inscription: Reading Figures of Latinidad (NYU Press 2024). Her articles and essays have been published in Women and Performance, ASAP/Journal, Diacritics, GLQ, Sargasso, Small Axe, Representations, and Post-45. She serves as the co-editor of the Gender Theory book series at SUNY Press.
Professor Emerita | University of Kansas | Spanish and Portuguese
Paper: José Quiroga’s Ways of Being in The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
Vicky Unruh (PhD University of Texas at Austin) is professor emerita at the University of Kansas, specializing in Latin American narrative, theater, and literary-intellectual culture and in twentieth and twenty-first century Cuban literary-intellectual culture. She is the author of Latin American Vanguards: The Art of Contentious Encounters (U of California P, 1994) and Performing Women and Modern Literary Culture in Latin America (U of Texas P, 2006); coeditor, with Jacqueline Loss, of The Cambridge History of Cuban Literature (Cambridge UP, 2024) and, with Michael Lazzara, of Telling Ruins in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); the coordinator of a special issue on Work for PMLA (October 2012); and, with Guillermina De Ferrari, coeditor of a dossier on Cuba’s Leonardo Padura for A Contracorriente (2015). Her numerous essays and articles have appeared in refereed journals and edited books in the US, Latin America, and Europe, and she is currently completing the monograph “Cuban Cartographies of Everyday Life, 1989-2020.” She is also the recipient of numerous research, teaching, and mentoring awards.
Associate Professor of Spanish | Spelman College | World Languages and Cultures
Paper: The Quiroga Effect: Queer Kinship and the Emotional Labor of the Archive
Anastasia Valecce is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Spelman College. She studies the cultural and artistic production of contemporary Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, focusing on film studies, visual culture, literature, and performance studies, through the queer, racial, and decolonial theoretical lens.
Her first book, Neorrealismo y cine en Cuba: historia y discurso en torno a la primera polémica de la Revolución (1951–1962) (Purdue University Press, 2020), retraces the ideological foundations of revolutionary Cuban cinema through its early engagements with Italian neorealism, drawing on previously unpublished archival materials to reassess the aesthetic and political stakes of the period. Her second book manuscript, Mujeres desobedientes: Cultural and Artistic Movements of Afro-Queer Puerto Rican Women, is forthcoming with University of Florida Press (2026). She is also currently working on a co-edited volume tentatively titled Dissident Identities: Afro-Queer New Media, Visual Arts, and Performance in the Hispanic Caribbean and its Diasporas (forthcoming, University of Florida Press). Her most recent articles have appeared in academic journals, such as: Centro: Journal of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Black Camera, Afro-Hispanic Review, and the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.
Meet the Moderators
Associate Professor | University of Miami | Department of History
Michael J. Bustamante (PhD, Yale University) is Associate Professor of History and the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Chair in Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of Cuban Memory Wars: Retrospective Politics in Revolution and Exile (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). With Jennifer Lambe (Brown University), he is co-editor of The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959-1980 (Duke University Press, 2019). As of 2024, he is co-editor of the journal Cuban Studies.
At UM, Dr. Bustamante serves as Director of Academic Programs at the Cuban Heritage Collection, the largest archival repository dedicated to Cuban materials outside of the island and the largest collection of materials on the Cuban diaspora in the world. In that capacity, he oversees fellowship and grant competitions, conferences, and other academic initiatives designed to activate the collection for scholarship and public conversations in the field of Cuban Studies. He simultaneously directs the undergraduate program in Cuban Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences and its affiliated academic minor.
Dr. Bustamante’s scholarly writing has appeared in Cold War History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Latino Studies, Cuban Studies, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Anthurium, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. His commentary on contemporary Cuban affairs has been featured in Foreign Affairs, NACLA Report on the Americas, Slate, Financial Times, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Miami, he served as Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Florida International University and Research Associate for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, D.C.
Professor | University of Miami | Modern Languages and Literatures and Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas
Dr. Lillian Manzor is Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures and Hemispheric Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami, Founding Director of the Cuban Theater Digital Archive (www.cubantheater.org), and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study of the Americas. She is co-editor of the book series Sualos, published jointly by Havana’s Editorial Alarcos and Miami’s CTDA Press. Her latest books are Marginality Beyond Return: US-Cuban Performances in the 1980s and 90s (Routledge 2023) and the coedited anthology Teatro de las tres Américas: escena, política y ficción. Antología Norte (Ediciones TeatroSinParedes 2022). Her current research project focuses on relations and mediation processes in the cultural field between Cuba and France in the mid-20th century including the repercussions on Cuban theater of French actor and director Louis Jouvet’s tour to Cuba (August-December 1943). Her research and cultural projects have been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation (at the Smithsonian Institution Theorizing Cultural Heritage Initiative), Cuban National Council for the Performing Arts, among others. As a community engaged scholar, she has been involved in developing US-Cuba cultural dialogues through theater and performance since 1993.
Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies | University of Miami | MLL
Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is the Marta Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She conducts research in colonial and postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She holds a BA from the University of Puerto Rico and earned her MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the University of Miami, Dr. Martínez-San Miguel held teaching positions at prestigious institutions including Princeton University, Rutgers, and the University of Pennsylvania. Her distinguished career includes authoring four books: Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (Iberoamericana, 1999); Caribe Two-Ways?: cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (Ediciones Callejón, 2003); From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (Bucknell, 2008); Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (Palgrave, 2014). Currently, she is completing her fifth book, Caribbean Archipelagoes: Comparative Insular and Colonial Studies, which will be released by the University of Florida Press in summer 2026. This interdisciplinary work aims to re-examine Caribbean studies by connecting it with early colonial studies, challenging traditional nationalist and Euro-centric perspectives. Additionally, Dr. Martínez-San Miguel co-edits the “Critical Caribbean Studies” book series for Rutgers University Press.
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