Faculty

Jens Andermann writes about modern Latin American arts, film, literature, architecture and material culture, and their intersections with legacies of coloniality and extractivism. He is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and the author of Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje (2018), New Argentine Cinema (2011, 2015), The Optic of the State. Visuality and Power in Argentina and Brazil (2007, 2014), and Mapas de poder. Una arqueología literaria del espacio argentino (2000). Before joining NYU, he taught at the University of Zurich and at Birkbeck College, London. He has been visiting professor at universities in Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin, and at Duke, Princeton, and Columbia. His work has appeared in numerous books and journals, including Memory Studies, Cinema Journal, Artelogie, Revista Iberoamericana, Journal of Material Culture, and Theory, Culture and Society.

ja138@nyu.edu

abe266@nyu.edu

Amelia Bande is a writer, performer and music maker, whose interdisciplinary work moves off the page toward connection and collectivity. Her low-fi musicals, propelled by humor and melodrama, are live capsules of queer intimacy. Her play Chueca received the National Playwriting Award in Chile, 2006. Partir y Renunciar was awarded a theater grant from the Chilean Culture and Arts Fund, 2009. She is a 2010 recipient of the Iberescena Grant for playwrights and a 2018 artist in residence at Yaddo. Her plays, essays and fiction have been widely published in both English and Spanish. She teaches writing and performance to people of all levels and experiences. In 2021 she launched Melios University, a self-organized online Spanish language school. Amelia grew up in Chile. She now lives in Los Angeles and sometimes New York.

Justin Berner studies how different media and forms of artistic practice represent the interrelations between humans, the environment, and technology. His interdisciplinary research studies contemporary Spanish cultural production through the fields of environmental humanities, posthuman studies, and new media studies. Currently, he serves as the Managing Editor for the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and was formerly a Global Perspectives on Society Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai. 

jmb10039@nyu.edu

Continental philosophy, philosophy and literature, ethical subjectivity, comparative literature, Spanish studies, poetry, tragedy, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, the ethical and the political.

gabriela.basterra@nyu.edu

Humberto Brito is a writer and photographer. He is tenured assistant professor at Universidade Nova de Lisboa’s Department of Portuguese Studies, where he teaches literary theory. He held visiting appointments at Stanford University, University of Chicago and Universidade de Lisboa. He works on the intersection of writing and photography, philosophy and literature, photobooks, modernist and contemporary Lusophone literature and poetry. He is the author of Avaria (2019), Estrada e Fantasmas (2020, 2023), Regras de Isolamento (2020), A Interrupção dos Sonhos (2021), and A Luz e a Escrita (2023).

hb2871@nyu.edu

Alejandro Castro (Caracas, 1986) is a Venezuelan researcher and writer. He holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese from New York University, a Bachelor’s degree in Arts from the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), and a Master’s degree in Latin American Literature from the Universidad Simón Bolívar (USB). Alejandro’s research spans diverse fields, including psychoanalysis, childhood studies, queer theory, and migration.

Prior to joining the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, he served as a professor in the Departments of Aesthetic Studies at the School of Arts and Literary Theory at the School of Literature, both at UCV. His scholarly work has been published in the Journal of Lusophone Studies and Cuadernos de Literatura. Alejandro is co-editor of the book Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience (HemiPress, 2019).

Furthermore, he is the author of several poetry books, including Parasitarias (2020), El lejano oeste (2013), which received the Book of the Year Award in 2014 from the Venezuelan Booksellers Association, and No es por vicio ni por fornicio. Uranismo y otras parafilias (2011), the winner of the 2010 Contest for Unpublished Authors by Monte Ávila Editores.

ajc800@nyu.edu

Lourdes Dávila is from San Juan, Puerto Rico. A professional dancer for 25 years, her academic writing focuses on the intersection of photography, dance/movement and writing in Latin America. She has published on Julio Cortázar, Mario Bellatin, Diamela Eltit, Eduardo Lalo, José Luis González, Martha Graham and Marie Bardet. She is the founder and managing director of the journal Esferas, which provides a shared space for the production of art and knowledge for artists, critics, undergraduates and graduate students. Fully dedicated to the teaching and advisement of students, Lourdes has won twice the CAS Golden Dozen Teaching Award and received the NYU Distinguished Teaching Award in the spring of 2019.

mdd5@nyu.edu

Comparative studies of the Americas, theory and history of the novel, Cuban and Caribbean Culture, nationhood and imperialism, syncretism and visual culture, memory and popular culture, national poets, public intellectuals and cultural genealogies, U.S. Latino cultures, North-South studies/cultural politics of the global South, gender and narrative, psychoanalysis and social mythologies.

amd7@nyu.edu

Early-modern Spanish literatures and cultures; cultural history; the body / anatomy; biopolitics; human / animal studies; gender studies; translation studies; canon formation / libraries; nation / empire; transatlantic studies; Cervantes

gdb3@nyu.edu

Aesthetics and Poetics of Modernism; Tradition and Revision in Latin American Poetry; Politics and Gender in Latin America Women Writers; French and Latin American Surrealism; Contemporary Latina Writers; Literary Theory.

md98@nyu.edu

Fan Fan earned her doctorate in Spanish and Portuguese at New York University and is enthused to join the department’s language faculty. 

Fan brings in a decade of experience in education from the diverse vantage points of teaching, facilitation and course and program design. Prior to earning her PhD, Fan taught at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) as a Fulbright grantee and led experiential education initiatives at The Hutong, Beijing’s premier cultural exchange venue. She also curates Arts Programming for her faith institution and previously served as Institutional Analyst for NYU’s Office of Academic and Student Affairs, where she built out the university’s professional development initiatives for graduate students. 

Fan’s academic research focuses on Asia-Latin American intersections. Her dissertation explored the ways economic and material transactions between China and Brazil shape everyday notions of race, culture and geography in literature, film and the visual arts. Her writing and translations have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

ff801@nyu.edu

James D. Fernández (Brooklyn, 1961) has been teaching at NYU since 1995. His research, teaching, publications and public humanities projects have focused on the conversion of experience into narrative, whether in the genre of autobiography in Spain, historical accounts of US participation in the Spanish Civil War, or the tales told by Spanish immigrants and their descendants in order to make sense of their experience. His most recent work on Spanish emigration to the US in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries has resulted in a major exhibition, which is currently touring Spain: Emigrantes invisibles: españoles en Estados Unidos, 1868-1945.

jf2@nyu.edu

Samuel Rudin Professor in the Humanities 

An academic and an artist, her work reflects and speculates on themes crucial to contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, political theory, black thought, feminist thought, and historical materialism. She is the author of Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007), A Dívida Impagavel (2019), Unpayable Debt (2022), Homo Modernus (2022), and La Deuda Impagable (2023) and  co-editor (with Paula Chakravartty) of Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime (JHUP, 2013) and (with Mark Harris) of Postcolonialism and the Law: Major Works (Routledge 2018) and Indigenous peoples and the Law: Major Works (Routledge, 2019). Her several articles and essays have been published in leading interdisciplinary journals have been translated into several languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Swedish, and Danish. Her artistic works include the films Serpent Rain (2016), 4Waters-Deep Implicancy (2018), and Soot Breath/Corpus Infinitum (2020), in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman; and the art practices Poethical Readings and The Sensing Salon, in collaboration with Valentina Desideri. She has exhibited and lectured at major art venues, such as the Pompidou Center (Paris), Whitechapel Gallery (London) MASP (Sāo Paulo), Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Guggenheim (New York), MACBA (Barcelona), Center for Contemporary Art (Glasgow), the 2022 Singapore Biennale, and the 10th Berlin Biennale. She has also written for publications for major art events (Liverpool Biennale, 2017; São Paulo Biennale, 2016; Venice Biennale, 2017, and Documenta 14) and featured in art publishing venues, such as Canadian Art, Texte Zur Kunst, Artalk, and E-Flux. She has taught at UC San Diego, University of British Columbia, and Queen Mary-University of London and visiting positions at Birkbeck-University of London, La Trobe University, University of Sao Paulo, Université Paris VIII and is currently an Adjunct Professor at Monash University Architecture, Design, and Art and serves as Faculty at the European Graduate School.

df2469@nyu.edu

Hemispheric Latin American and Latinx literary and cultural studies, music, popular culture, feminist and queer studies, psychoanalysis 

lfm4@nyu.edu

Caribbean literature and culture; Spanish American Independence; the Haitian Revolution; culture and politics in the nineteenth century; the history of political thought.

smf287@nyu.edu

Gabriel Giorgi works on Latin American contemporary literatures, art and cinema, with a focus on the Southern Cone and Brazil. Biopolitics, the non-human, and queerness articulate many of his critical interventions. He has published "Sueños de exterminio. Homosexualidad y representación en la literatura argentina contemporánea" (Rosario, Beatriz Viterbo, 2004), "Formas comunes. Animalidad, biopolítica, cultura" (Buenos Aires, Eterna Cadencia, 2014; translated into Portuguese in 2016) and more recently, in collaboration with Ana Kiffer, "Las vueltas del odio. Gestos, escrituras, políticas" (Buenos Aires, Eterna Cadencia, 2020; published in Brazil in 2019) He has also co-edited with Fermin Rodriguez the anthology "Excesos de vida. Ensayos sobre biopolítica" ( Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2007) Besides NYU he has been visiting professor at universities in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador. His articles have been published in USA, Spain and Latin America.

gag206@nyu.edu

jch524@nyu.edu

Julia C. Hernández is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work bridges the fields Hispanic Studies and Classics. With training in both areas, she specializes in the history of ancient Greek—from its teaching to its translation to its reconstructed literary production—in the early modern Spanish-speaking world. Additionally, her work explores the legacies of Greco-Roman ethno-geographic traditions in shaping early modern conceptions of empire. Her teaching and research also explore the intersections of Classics, Early Modernity, and US Latinx identity. Julia has served as Managing Editor of the international early modern Spanish theater journal Bulletin of the Comediantes since 2019 and is co-founder of the organization Hesperides: Classics in the Luso-Hispanic World.

ri2098@nyu.edu

Rita Indiana is a Dominican-born New York-based music composer, and a key figure in contemporary Latinamerican literature; Tentacle won the Grand Prize of the Association of Caribbean Writers in 2017, the first Spanish-language book to do so. She is the author of five novels and is a driving force in experimental Caribbean popular music. She writes about queer outsiders in possible and impossible worlds and teaches storytelling to people of all ages and backgrounds. She is the Interim Director of the MFA Creative Writing in Spanish Program.

Jill Lane is Associate Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is author of Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895 (UPenn Press), which focuses on performance, race, and anticolonial sentiment in 19th century Cuba. Her research focuses on performance and visual culture in Latin America, and she teaches courses on theatre, performance art, and “political gesture” in the region. She is past co-editor of emisférica (2008–2018), and co-editor with Peggy Phelan of The Ends of Performance (NYU Press).

jill.lane@nyu.edu

Jordana Mendelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and affiliate faculty in Art History and CLACS. Her research focuses on early 20th-century Spanish visual culture and the history of photography and print culture. She is the author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation 1929-1939, co-editor of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity; curator of Encounters with the 1930s, and Revistas y Guerra 1936-1939, and co-curator of Margaret Michaelis: Fotografía, Vanguardia y República en la Barcelona de la República and Miró-ADLAN. She serves on the advisory committee of the Archivo Español de Arte and Culture & History, the Editorial Board of Modernism/Modernity, and is Editor of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Her current book project is tentatively titled Administrating Modernity: The Cultural Politics of Paper in 1930s Spain. She is currently Director of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC).

jm3318@nyu.edu

Lina Meruane is Chilean writer and scholar. She has published two collections of short stories and five novels translated into twelve languages, as well as several essay books. She received the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Novel Prize (Mexico 2012), the Anna Seghers Prize (Germany, 2011) as well as grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a DAAD Writer in Residence in Berlin, among others. Her scholarly work focuses on Disease Studies, Gender Studies & Feminisms, Arabic Migration to Latin America, Creative Writing (Fiction & Non Fiction).

Urayoán Noel is the author of In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (Iowa, 2014), which received the LASA Latino Studies Section Book Prize and the MLA Prize in US Latina/o and Chicana/o Literary and Cultural Studies Honorable Mention, and eight books of poetry, including Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (Arizona, 2015) and Transversal (Arizona, 2021). Noel has been a fellow of the Ford Foundation, the Howard Foundation, the Schomburg Center, Macondo, and CantoMundo, as well as a finalist for the National Translation Award and the Best Translated Book Award. His performances include Poesiefestival Berlin, Barcelona Poesia, and the Toronto Biennial of Art, and his work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York and the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. Noel has also taught at SUNY Albany, Stetson University's MFA of the Americas, and CantoMundo, and he serves on The Latinx Project's faculty board and on The Clemente Center's board of directors.

tun202@nyu.edu

S.J. Pearce teaches and researches in the area of the intellectual history and literature of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in medieval Spain. Her first book, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, examines the ways in which Jewish intellectuals in 13th-century Spain and France understood Arabic to be a language of cultural prestige, and was awarded the 2019 La Corónica International Book Award. She earned her PhD at Cornell University and has held research fellowships at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the New York and Tel Aviv campuses of NYU. She is currently preparing a new biography of Moses Maimonides and a monograph on the reception of the Andalusi poet-statesman figure in 19th and 20th-century nationalist discourses, as well as several edited volumes on related subjects.

sjp264@nyu.edu

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida is a writer. She is the author of over ten books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Esse Cabelo [That Hair] (2015), Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso (2018), As Telefones (2019), the trilogy Três Histórias de Esquecimento (A Visão das Plantas, Maremoto, Bruma) (2021) and Ferry (2022). She is a two-time recipient of Oceanos Prize (2019, 2020). Her writing has appeared widely in journals and newspapers in Portuguese and has been translated into ten languages. Djaimilia has been collaborating with visual artists, composers, performers and theatre directors. Her interests include: fiction writing, philosophy and photography, diaspora studies.

dp3918@nyu.edu

Cultural and theoretical production of Brazil and Cuba; African Diasporas; intellectual and cultural histories, media, cinema, and popular music.  Currently Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS).

dlr239@nyu.edu

Philosophy and Aesthetic theory; theories of Romanticism and Avant-garde in Europe and Latin America; critical theory of colonialism; critique of postmodernism & spectacle.

ers4@nyu.edu

Diana Taylor is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. She is the award-winning author of multiple books, among them: Theatre of Crisis (1991), Disappearing Acts (1997), The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Performance (2016), and ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence (2020). Taylor was the Founding Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics from 1998 to 2000. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and several other major awards. In 2017, Taylor was President of the Modern Language Association. In 2018 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Science.

dt7@nyu.edu

Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez received a BA from the University of Puerto Rico and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Laura’s areas of research include Mexican literary, film and cultural studies; Asian-Latin American studies; transpacific ecologies and poetics; archipelagic and decolonial thinking; feminist aesthetics; and Marxist theory.

She is the author of Orientaciones transpacíficas: la modernidad mexicana y el espectro de Asia (2019). In 2020 the book won the first prize for the LASA Mexico Section Best Book in the Humanities, and received an honorable mention for the 2019 MLA Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize. Laura has also published about the Mexican contemporary novel, “world literature” theory, feminist pedagogies, transpacific histories of the US-Mexico borderlands, and on Puerto Rican performance and arts in the age of debt and PROMESA. Currently, she is a team member in the Cross-Currents Bennett-Polonsky Humanities Lab (2021-22).

ljt233@nyu.edu

Zeb Tortorici’s research focuses on gender and sexuality in colonial Latin America, queer archives, and the archiving of erotica and the “obscene” in Latin America, from the eighteenth century to the present. His book Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018) received several prizes including the 2019 John Boswell Award from the Committee on LGBT History. He has edited or coedited several books including Centering Animals in Latin American History (2013); Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America (2016); Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History (2019); Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge (2020); and Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (2020). He has also coedited special issues of Radical History Review; TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly; and the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.

zt3@nyu.edu

ameya.tripathi@nyu.edu

Ameya Tripathi researches the modern literatures and cultures of Spain in the context of colonialism, revolution, migration and translation. His current book project, Documents of Revolution: Literacy, Translation, and Internationalism in the Spanish Civil War argues that revolutionary documents across poetry, prose, and multimedia including radio broadcasts, films, and scrapbooks, require a different, anti-colonial understanding of documents. This project explores local and visiting authors, including Spanish authors such as Mateo Santos, Miguel Hernández and María Teresa León; and visiting authors including Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Nancy Cunard. As a range of diverse anarchist, Black, and feminist internationalisms collided, Spain became the crucible for a new kind of dissident documentary style. This project will be expanded by considering non-aligned internationalism in the context of the war, including a wide range of protagonists from India, Palestine, Equatorial Guinea, Morocco, Mexico and Cuba. Ameya's next project will focus on short urban writing, such as the microrelato, in the context of the growth of ‘informal empire”, as declining imperial powers continued to wield global influence through tax havens, monopolies, and hierarchical regimes of urban planning and organization.

Poet and critic Lila Zemborain (Argentina) is the author of several poetry collections: Abrete sésamo debajo del agua (1993), Usted (1998), Guardianes del secreto (2002) - translated into English as Guardians of the Secret (2009), Malvas orquídeas del mar (2004) - translated into English as Mauve Sea-orchids (2007), Rasgado (2006) –translated into French as Déchiré (2013), El rumor de los bordes (2011), Diario de la hamaca paraguaya (2014), and Materia blanda (2014). Her published poetry books together with two unpublished manuscripts have been recently compiled in Matrix Lux. Poesía reunida:1989-2019.

Zemborain holds a Ph.D. degree from New York University. As a critic, she is the author of Gabriela Mistral. Una mujer sin rostro (2002 / 2019). Since 2004, she curates the KJCC Poetry Series at New York University. In 2007 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship. 

lz2@nyu.edu