Register via Zoom HERE
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The event is the presentation of the project of the first comprehensive history of Cuban literature in English, edited by Vicky Unruh and Jacqueline Loss. The editors will discuss the reach of this forthcoming history (currently on track for release in 2024) and the conceptual threads that guide the book design, while two of the volume's contributors will reflect upon the experience of working with the framework that the volume sets forth.
Speaker(s) name and bio:
Vicky Unruh, Professor Emerita at the University of Kansas, specializes in Latin American narrative, theatre, and 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); co-editor, with Michael Lazzara, of Telling Ruins in Latin America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); coordinator of a special issue on Work for PMLA (October 2012) and, with Guillermina De Ferrari, co-editor of a dossier on Cuba’s Leonardo Padura for A Contracorriente (2015). Her numerous articles have appeared in a wide range of refereed journals and edited books, including essays on Cuban narrative, theatre, film, and literary culture. She is also the recipient of several research, teaching, and mentoring awards.
Jacqueline Loss is a professor of Latin American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Connecticut. She is author of Dreaming in Russian. The Cuban Soviet Imaginary (2013) and Cosmopolitanisms and Latin America: Against the Destiny of Place (2005) and co-editor of Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience (with José Manuel Prieto, 2012) and New Short Fiction from Cuba (with Esther Whitfield, 2007). Her translation of Jorge Mañach's An Inquiry into Choteo was published by Linkgua in 2018. Her essays and translations have appeared in Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Nepantla, Chasqui, Latino and Latina Writers, New Centennial Review, Bomb, Transnational Screens, Kamchatka, The Global South, Brooklyn Rail, The Massachusetts Review, among other publications. She is currently co-directing a film entitled Finotype with Juan Carlos Alom.
Roberto Ignacio Díaz is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, where he teaches and writes on Latin American cultural and literary history with a focus on transatlantic relations. He is the author of Unhomely Rooms: Foreign Tongues and Spanish American Literature, and articles on the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Mayra Montero; the letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo; and, most recently, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s opera, Les Indes galantes. His monograph on the historical and textual convergences of Latin America and the field of opera, which includes a chapter on Cuba, is forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press.
Marta Hernández Salván is Associate Professor of Spanish in the Hispanic Studies Department at University of California, Riverside where she specializes in contemporary Caribbean cultural production; other interests include postmarxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory and film. Her monograph Minima Cuba: Heretical Poetics and Power in Post-Soviet Cuba (SUNY Press, 2015) explores the exhaustion of the allegorical and melancholic rhetoric of the Cuban Revolution, and the poetics of irony developed in the current biopolitical era. She is co-editor of Asedios a lo increado: Nuevas perspectivas sobre Lezama Lima (Madrid: Verbum, 2015) and she has published numerous articles on Cuban cultural production and poetry in The New Centennial Review, Revista Hispánica Moderna, and Romance Quarterly among others.