Albert Sergio Laguna is Associate Professor of Ethnicity, Race & Migration and American Studies at Yale University. His research and teaching interests include transnational Latinx literatures and cultures, comparative ethnic studies, performance studies, and popular culture studies. His award-winning work has been published in Latino Studies, The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Latin American Research Review, Contemporary Literature, Cultural Critique, Diario de Cuba, The Miami Herald, The Washington Post, and on CNN.com. Laguna’s first book, Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America, was published by NYU Press in 2017.

Amalia Pallares serves as the Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence at Arizona State University and is a professor in the School of Transborder Studies. She is the former Vice Chancellor of Diversity, Equity and Engagement at the University of Illinois Chicago. A scholar of social movements and political identities in Latin America and the United States, she is a Co-Principal Investigator of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator, and an Associate Professor in English and Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018. His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human received the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His most recent translation is Paula Ilabaca Nuñez’s The Loose Pearl (2022), winner of the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia received the 2017 National Translation Award. He has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita, and Jaime Luis Huenún. At UIC he directs the Center for Latinx Literature and the Americas.

Deanna Ledezma (she/her) is the Postdoctoral Research Associate for the Inter-University Program for Latino Research/UIC Mellon Program. She earned her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Illinois Chicago and specializes in the history and theory of photography and Latinx art and visual culture. She is also a Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches in the Departments of Art History and Liberal Arts. She is currently completing her book manuscript Unsettled Archives: Kinships and Diasporas in Latinx Photography. Previous publications include essays, articles, and reviews in Art Journal, Photography & Culture, caa.reviews, Latin American Art and Visual Culture, and the book Reworking Labor. Forthcoming scholarly essays will be published in two edited volumes: The Routledge Handbook of American Material Culture Studies and Feminist Visual Solidarities and Kinships. Green Lantern Press and Walls Divide Press have distributed her nonfiction essays. Complementing her research practice, she collaborates with artists on creative projects, including an artists’ publication and exhibition with Josh Rios and Anthony Romero at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute in Fall 2024. For more information, please visit her website https://www.deannaledezma.com

Dolores Inés Casillas is Director of the Chicano Studies Institute and Professor in the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research focuses on immigrant engagement with U.S. Spanish-language and bilingual media. She is the author of the award winning book Sounds of Belonging: U.S. Spanish-language Radio and Public Advocacy (NYU Press, 2014) and co-editor with María Elena Cepeda (Williams College) of the Companion to Latina/o Media Studies (Routledge, 2016), and co-editor with Mary Bucholtz and Jin Sook Lee (UCSB) of Feeling It: Language It: Language, Race and Affect in Latinx Youth Learning (Routledge, 2018), her current manuscript, under contract with New York University Press, explores the politics of language learning and language play as heard through different sound media technologies. She is a Principal Investigator in the Crossing Latinidades Research Working Group Latinx Sound Culture.

Elizabeth Cerejido is a curator and scholar of modern and contemporary Latin American and Latinx art, with a specialization in the visual arts production and cultural politics of Cuba and its diaspora. Cerejido received her PhD in Art History from the University of Florida in Gainesville and earned her Master’s of Arts in Latin American Studies at University of Miami. In 2014, Cerejido was awarded a Knight Foundation Arts Challenge grant for “Dialogues in Cuban Art,” a multi-year project that brought together Cuban and Cuban American artists and curators through cultural exchanges and symposia in both Miami and Havana. She recently curated Radical Conventions: Cuban American Art From the 1980s for the Lowe Art Museum and contributed several essays for the exhibition catalog. Dr. Cerejido was named the Esperanza Bravo de Varona Chair of the Cuban Heritage Collection (CHC) of the University of Miami Libraries in 2018. She currently serves as the CHC’s Curator for Cuban Collections.

Faculty Profile: Elizabeth Cerejido | University of Miami Libraries

Esther Díaz Martín, Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latino Studies and Gender and Women's Studies at UIC, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin (2018). She is a first-generation campesina migrante from Jalisco raised in Central California (entre las vacas y los files). Her scholarship bridges Chicana Feminist Studies, Latinx Cultural Studies, Radio/Podcasting, and Sound Studies. Her research has been published in Chicana/Latina Studies, Diálogo, Spanish and Portuguese Review, and Sounding Out! Essays on the politics of knowledge-making are published in Voices from the Ancestors and Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities. Her book Latina Radiophonic Feminism(s) (forthcoming UT Press) theorizes a feminist/nepantlera listening attending to the political sound work of Latina voices. A forthcoming chapter in Y Yo También: Latinas Respond to #MeToo discusses the sound of feminist rage in Chicana/Latina podcasting. She is a principal investigator in the Latinx Sound Cultures Studies-Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative working group.

Héctor Duarte was born in 1952 in Caurio, Michoacan, Mexico. He studied mural painting at the workshop of David Alfaro Siqueiros in 1977. Since moving to Chicago in 1985, Duarte has participated in the creation of more than 50 murals. He has exhibited his paintings and prints in solo and collective shows at such venues as the National Museum of Mexican Art, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the State of Illinois Gallery, the Chicago Historical Society, and Casa Estudio Museo Diego Rivera in Mexico among others. He is the recipient of an Artist Fellowship Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 2008, Artistic Production Awards from the Secretary of Culture of the state of Michoacán in 2005 and 2007, the Chicago Bar Association Award for best work of public art in 1995, and National Endowment for the Arts project grant a 1995. In 2006 he was invited to exhibit at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Duarte is the co-founder of the Julio Ruelas Print Workshop in Zacatecas, Mexico, La Casa de la Cultura in Zamora, Mexico, and the Mexican Printmaking Workshop in Chicago.

Jennifer Boles is an experimental documentary filmmaker and artist. She is Assistant Professor in the School of Film and Photography at Montana State University where she teaches photo and film history, film studies, and film production in the undergraduate program and the MFA Program in Science and Natural History Filmmaking. Her work has been exhibited as installations and theatrically in festivals. She received her Ph.D. in History at Indiana University and MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern University. She is the former Program Coordinator for the IUPLR Mellon Fellows Program and works as a consultant for the Crossing Latinidades Summer Institute.

Jonathan Rosa is Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Education, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and, by courtesy, Departments of Anthropology, Linguistics, and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His research examines the co-naturalization of language and race as an organizing dynamic within modern governance, tracking colonially structured interrelations among racial marginalization, linguistic stigmatization, and institutional inequity. He collaborates with schools and communities to understand these phenomena and develop tools for challenging the forms of vulnerability to which they correspond. Rosa is author of the award-winning book, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2019, Oxford University Press), and co-editor of the volume, Language and Social Justice in Practice (2019, Routledge). His work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Harvard Educational Review, American Ethnologist, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and Language in Society, as well as media outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, NPR, and Univision.

Karma R. Chávez is Chair and Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor in the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at the University of Texas - Austin. She is author of Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013); Palestine on the Air (University of Illinois Press, 2019); and The Borders of AIDS: Race, Quarantine, and Resistance (University of Washington Press, 2021).

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is Professor of American Culture, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author of Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), Escenas transcaribeñas: ensayos sobre teatro, performance y cultura (Isla Negra Editores, 2018), and Translocas: The Politics of Puerto Rican Drag and Trans Performance (University of Michigan Press, 2021), and coeditor of Keywords for Latina/o Studies (New York University Press, 2017). His books of fiction include Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails and Abolición del pato. Larry performs in drag as Lola von Miramar since 2010 and has appeared in several episodes of the YouTube series Cooking with Drag Queens. He is currently writing a book on contemporary Puerto Rican performance.

Lourdes Torres is Vincent de Paul Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at DePaul University. She served as editor-in-chief of Latino Studies from 2012 to 2023 and is co-series editor of the Global Latin/o American Series of the University of Ohio Press. Her research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, Spanish in the U.S., and queer Latinidades. She is the author of Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb, co-author of Spanish in Chicago and co-editor of Latino Studies: A 20th Anniversary Reader, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, and Tortilleras: Hispanic and the Latina Lesbian Expressions. She is currently working on a history of LLEGÓ, The National Latino/a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Organization that ran from 1987 to 2004 and advocated for queer Latinx issues.

María de los Ángeles Torres is University Distinguished Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago and Principal Investigator of Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and has taught at DePaul University from 1987 to 2000 and since then has taught at UIC. She is the former Executive Director of the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR). Dr. Torres is the author of The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US and the Promise of a Better Future (Beacon Press, 2004); In the Land of Mirrors: The Politics of Cuban Exiles in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 1999); and The Elusive Present: Democracy and Time in Cuban Thought: The Elusive Present (University of Florida, 2024) as well of co-editor of several books and author of many chapters and essays.

Odette Casamayor-Cisneros is Associate Professor of Latin American, Caribbean and Latinx Cultural Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. A Cuban-born scholar of contemporary Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies, she received her Ph.D. in Art and Literature from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris in 2002 and taught at the University of Connecticut, before joining Penn in 2019. Her current scholarship is centered on Afro-Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx cultural production and epistemologies. She is the author of Utopia, distopía e ingravidez: reconfiguraciones cosmológicas en la narrativa postsoviética cubana (Vervuert, 2013); Una casa en Los Catskills (1st edition, La Secta de los Perros, 2012, and 2nd edition, Letras Cubanas, 2016) and is working on three book projects: Birthing Ourselves: Black Womanhood and Epistemological Marronage in Afro-Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Production; n Black Ink: Writings From the Flesh of a Black Cuban Woman; On Being Blacks: Self-Identification and Counter-hegemonic Knowledge in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Cultural Production.

Olga U. Herrera is an art historian, scholar, independent curator, and currently Managing Director of the UIC Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalization, networks of cultural production, and circulation of modern and contemporary art of the Americas. She is the author of American Interventions and Modern Art in South America (University Press of Florida, 2017) winner of the 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication; Toward the Preservation of a Heritage: Latin American and Latino Art in the Midwestern United States (University of Notre Dame, 2008); and editor of the books Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic (AMA, 2019); iliana emilia García: The Reason/The Object/The Word (AMA, 2019); and María Luisa Pacheco: Geographies of Abstraction: Madrid, La Paz, New York (AMA, 2024) as well as essays and interviews. Herrera earned a Ph.D. in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and theories of globalization from George Mason University.

Sara Veronica Hinojos (ella/her) is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and serves on the advisory board of the Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) Program at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on representation of Chicanxs and Latinxs within popular film and television with an emphasis on gender, race, language politics, and humor studies. She is currently working on a book manuscript that investigates the racial, visual, and sonic function of “accents” within media, called: GWAT?!: Chicanx Mediated Race, Gender, and “Accents” in the US. She has published in Aztlán: Journal of Chicana and Chicano Studies, Latino Studies, and in the compilation, Thinking With An Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice from UC Press.

Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez is an Afro-Puerto Rican writer, teacher, and scholar from Hoboken, NJ. She is Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies at CUNY Hunter and is the Directora of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO). She is author of the award-winning book Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literature (Northwestern University Press, 2020; translation, Editora Educación Emergente, 2023), and the forthcoming book, The Survival of a People (under contract with Duke University Press). Her published work can be found in Hypatia, Decolonization, CENTRO Journal, Small Axe, Frontiers Journal, Hispanofila, Contemporânea, Diálogos, and Feminist Formations. Dr. Figueroa-Vásquez was a Duke University Mellon SITPA Fellow, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, and a Cornell University Society for the Humanities Fellow. She is the PI and co-director of the 2022-2024 Andrew W. Mellon funded “Diaspora Solidarities Lab,” a $2M Higher Learning project focused on Black feminist digital humanities initiatives that support solidarity work in Black and Ethnic Studies.