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.

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

gabriela.basterra@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

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

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

Charles A. McDonald is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and the 2022-2023 Scholar-in-Residence at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center (KJCC). Dr. McDonald received his Ph.D. in anthropology and historical studies from the New School for Social Research (2019). He is currently finishing his first book, Return to Sepharad: Citizenship, Conversion, and the Politics of Repair, which is an experimental ethnography of the return of Jews and Judaism in contemporary Spain. His writing has appeared in journals including Comparative Studies in Society and History, Cultural Anthropology, and American Ethnologist. His most recent publication—a chapter on the ethics of refusal—can be found in the volume Reparative Citizenship for Sephardi Descendants: Returning to the Jewish Past in Spain and Portugal (2023), edited by Dalia Kandiyoti and Rina Benmayor. A new ethnographic project, Queer Nightlife Ecologies, investigates how raving and nightlife are reshaping the pandemic politics of care, pleasure, and ethics. His research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Wenner-Gren Foundation, Posen Foundation, the Center for Jewish History, and the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). Before coming to NYU, McDonald held postdoctoral fellowships at Northwestern University and Rice University, and has been a visiting researcher at the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Since 2015, he has been Managing Director of the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry (ICSI) at the New School.

cam716@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 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

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

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.

ku2026@nyu.edu

Kirmen Uribe is one of the most relevant writers of his generation in Spain. He won the National Prize for Literature in Spain in 2009 for his first novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao, a work that was acclaimed as a literary event. His work has been published in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review or El País, and translated into several languages, including French (Gallimard), English (Graywolf), Japanese (Hakusuisha), and Dutch (De Blauwe Tijger). He has written two volumes of poems and three novels. In 2017, he was selected for the Iowa International Writers Program, and awarded a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship for 2018-2019, to work on his fourth novel. Currently he teaches Creative Writing at the New York University. Originally from the town of Ondarroa, Basque Country, Uribe is now based in New York City.

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