Speakers – Listening with the Eyes

Conference Presenters

Carlos Abreu Mendoza
Associate Professor, Texas State University

Carlos Abreu Mendoza is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Texas State University. His current research focuses on the thematization of sound in nation-building narratives, the affective and emotional economies at play in nineteenth-century racialization processes, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. With anthropologist Denise Y. Arnold, he co-edited the volume Crítica de la razón andina (Editorial A Contracorriente / UNC Press, 2018). His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as MLN, A Contracorriente, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana, Chasqui, and Latin American Literary Review. He is working on a book project that rethinks how aurality gave shape to key debates concerning humanity, rationality, technology, and culture that define the period of national consolidation in Latin America. A chapter from this project, titled “Tuning the Indian: Creole Discourse, Citizenship, and Aurality in (Post)colonial Latin America,” is forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Latin America.

Anke Birkenmaier
Professor, Indiana University

Anke Birkenmaier is Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has published widely on Cuban literature, sound studies, the international avant-garde, and on the intellectual history of Latin America. Her first award-winning book, Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 2006) explores Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s decade long collaboration with French dissident surrealists and radio pioneers. Her book, The Specters of Race. Latin American Anthropology and Literature between the Wars (University of Virginia Press, 2016) is a study of the interconnected scientific and literary networks preoccupied with the relation between race and culture in the time between the two world wars, leading to the rise of Latin American studies after 1945. Birkenmaier has also co-edited Havana beyond the Ruins: Cultural Mappings after 1989 (Duke University Press, 2011) and Caribbean Migrations. The Legacies of Colonialism (Rutgers University Press, 2020).

Azucena Hernández
Assistant Professor, University of Arizona

Azucena Hernández Ramírez es de Ciudad Juárez, México. Sus intereses de investigación se centran en la literatura latinoamericana con acercamientos interdisciplinarios a los estudios aurales y de sonido, la teoría crítica y la literatura colonial y poscolonial, con especial énfasis en el siglo XIX mexicano. En su disertación analiza el fin-de-siècle mexicano marcado por el surgimiento de un exceso sonoro, que define como la proliferación de sonidos (tecnológicos y humanos) que modificaron las artes y la política durante el Porfiriato. Publica artículos académicos y otras prosas. Su novela, El monstruo mundo (Ars Communis Editorial, 2016) obtuvo una mención honorífica en los International Latino Book Awards 2018. Comenzó como Assistant Professor en Arizona State University en otoño del 2022.

Daniel Hernández
Visiting Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University

Daniel Hernández is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wesleyan University. Born in Colombia, he received a BA in Literary Studies at Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and he completed his PhD in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University in 2022. His current research focuses on how ethnographic practice and the use of new recording technology in the Caribbean and the Amazon rainforest transformed literature in these regions over the course of the early twentieth century. His broader interests include media theory, new materialisms, race and ethnic studies, and the relationship between anthropology and literature at large.

Joseph Wager
PhD Candidate, Stanford University

Joseph Wager is a PhD Candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. He holds an MA in Literary Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a BA in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley. He has presented at conferences and published in Colombia, Mexico, and the United States. He currently coordinates two Working Groups—Caribbean Studies Reading Group; Law and Literature in the Global South. He has taught several courses at the Universidad Nacional and Stanford.

Pamela Zamora Quesada
PhD Student, University of British Columbia

Pamela Zamora Quesada es estudiante de doctorado en Estudios Hispánicos en University of British Columbia. Allí ha trabajado como asistente de investigación en proyectos relacionados al sonido en literatura latinoamericana y así como sobre la novela corta de mujeres. Su investigación versa sobre la auralidad literaria y las representaciones de género en la literatura mexicana y centroamericana contemporánea. Hizo su pregrado en Filología Española en la Universidad de Costa Rica y en el 2019 completó su maestría en literatura en West Virginia University. Escribió su tesis sobre la ópera costarricense La Ruta de su Evasión (2017) y los ritmos latinoamericanos como estrategias de resistencia patriarcal. Actualmente está preparando un artículo sobre su tesis.

Virtual Workshop Participants

Luís Calí, performance artist, Música Maya Aj, Guatemala

Luis Calí es un artista kaqchikel multifacético originario de San Juan Comalapa, Chimaltenango, Guatemala que desde temprana edad mostró sus habilidades artísticas. Las artes que ha explorado han sido la pintura al óleo, la actuación teatral, la danza, la poesía y la música.

Actualmente dirige Música Maya Aj uno de los grupos de música de especial aceptación en el ámbito nacional e internacional por su estilo y género musical. Luis ha musicalizado diferentes cortometrajes y documentales entre ellos, Abrazos de Luis Argueta, El vuelo del azacuán de Rafael González, Resonancia de Cinetenango Films y El camino es largo de Edgar Sajcabún, entre otros. Desde el año 2,000 ha participado en eventos a nivel internacional en Puerto Rico, Alemania, París, Houston, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Los Ángeles, Las Vegas, Austria, México y Costa Rica. Ha intercambiado y fusionado el arte maya con artistas de otros géneros musicales, como Camera Orchestra de Leipzig Alemania, Orchestra Bach Ensemble y con Mark Anthony y Jennifer López en “Q’Viva! The Chosen En Vivo”. También se dedica a la elaboración de instrumentos sonoros en madera, bambú y cerámica, entre otros.

Rita Palacios, Professor, Conestoga College Ontario

Rita M. Palacios es doctora en literatura latinoamericana por la Universidad de Toronto y es profesora en la Escuela de Estudios Interdisciplinarios en Conestoga College en Kitchener, Ontario, Canadá. Se especializa en literatura Maya contemporánea escrita en Guatemala y México vista desde una lente descolonial y con un enfoque de género. Ha escrito artículos sobre literatura, arte y performance indígena y en 2019 publicó el libro Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge con Paul M. Worley de la Universidad de Western Carolina.

Paul Worley, Associate Professor, Western Carolina University

Paul M. Worley es profesor de literatura global en Western Carolina University. Escrito con Rita M. Palacios, su libro Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge (Des-escribir la literatura maya: una propuesta desde el ts’íib; 2019) recibió una mención honorífica en el Premio LASA-México 2020 para el mejor libro en Humanidades. Es autor de Telling and Being Told: Storytelling and Cultural Control in Contemporary Yucatec Maya Literatures (Contar y ser contado: Los cuentacuentos y el control cultural en la literatura maya yucateca; 2013; performances de este proyecto se encuentran en tsikbalichmaya.org), becario Fulbright, y en 2018 ganó el Premio Sturgis Leavitt del Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies. Aparte de su trabajo académico, ha traducido las obras de los escritores indígenas Hubert Malina, Adriana López, Manuel Tzoc, y Ruperta Bautista, entre otros.

Ana Cecilia Calle, Assistant Professor, Wake Forest University

Ana Cecilia Calle is a Colombian multidisciplinary scholar and Assistant Professor of Afro-Latin American Cultural Studies at Wake Forest University. She holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, Along the Cumbia Beat. Literary, Cultural and Sonic Practices in Colombia and Argentina was funded by the Tinker Foundation and the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is founder and editor of Himpar Editores, a Colombian independent press, and DJ’s with Chulita Vinyl Club, an all-women, all-vinyl music collective.

Erin Graff Zivin, Professor, University of Southern California

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of three books: Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham UP, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern UP, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke UP, 2008). Graff Zivin is the editor of two dossiers, “In Honor of Peggy Kamuf” (Discourse, 2019) and “Women in Theory” (diacritics, 2022), as well as the books The Marrano Specter: Derrida and Hispanism (Fordham University Press, 2017) and The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and co-editor (with Jacques Lezra, Alberto Moreiras, and José Luis Villacañas) of Terror: La perspectiva hispana, which was recently published by Guillermo Escolar in Madrid, Spain.

Victor Sierra Matute, Assistant Professor, Baruch College, CUNY

Victor Sierra Matute is Assistant Professor of Spanish Cultural Studies at Baruch College (CUNY). His research focuses on the intersection of materiality, affect, and history of the senses in the early modern Iberian world. He is the editor of Soundscapes of the Early Modern Iberian Empires (under contract with Routledge). His work on soundscapes and aurality has appeared in the edited volume Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production and is forthcoming in the Journal of Romance Studies.

Co-Organizers & Chairs

Amanda M. Smith, Associate Professor, University of California Santa Cruz

Amanda M. Smith’s research explores relationships among space, ecology, decoloniality, and development in Latin American and Latinx cultures. Her book, Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool University Press, 2021), examines how stories told about the Amazon in canonical twentieth-century novels have shaped the way people across the globe understand and use the region. Her next book project examines contemporary Latin American comics at the intersection of environmental crisis and feminist and queer politics. Smith is co-founder of the Latin American Sound Studies Working Group with Tamara Mitchell. Her work has appeared in The Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies; ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America; A contracorriente; Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures; and Ciberletras. She also co-edited the provocative graphic novel, United States of Banana.

Tamara L. Mitchell, Assistant Professor, University of British Columbia

Tamara L. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines the relationship among aesthetics, politics, and the literary tradition, with a focus on contemporary Mexican and Central American narrative fiction. Her peer-reviewed work has been published in Modern Language Notes, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Chasqui, and CR: New Centennial Review, among other venues. Mitchell’s first book, Novel Crises: Neoliberalism, Post-Nationalism, and Mexican and Central American Literature, considers contemporary narrative fiction that represents and responds to the myriad crises that arise due to burgeoning neoliberal globalization. Her second book project, supported by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, is titled Sounds of the Capitalocene: Violence and Aurality in Latin American Narrative Fiction and considers how 20th- and 21st-century authors turn to aurality in narrative fiction as a means of critiquing and responding to exclusionary politics, economic inequalities, gendered violence, and ecological devastation of the neoliberal present.