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About the Conference

Every year, the students of the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Maryland host a conference featuring panels of graduate and undergraduate students as well as important keynote speakers from the various communities that make up Latin American Studies.

LASC Directors

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Merle Collins

LASC Director

Merle Collins is the Director of LASC. She is a professor in the Department of English and a 2018 UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher. Dr. Collins has a B.A., English and Spanish from the Mona, Jamaica campus of the University of the West Indies, an M.A. in Latin American Studies and Certificate in Spanish to English Translation, from Georgetown University, and a Ph.D. in Government (with a focus on Grenada) from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Also a creative writer, Collins is the author of novels, collections of poetry, short story collections, and several critical essays on Caribbean literature and Grenadian culture and politics. Her most recent essay, “Cultural Expression and the Grenada Revolution,” was published in an edited collection, Perspectives on the Grenada Revolution, 1979 ‐1983. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.

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Eric Tomalá 

LASC Assistant Director

Eric Tomalá joined LASC in January 2017. He received his bachelor’s degree in Economics and International Business and a Master of Arts in Sociology. Eric’s academic interest is the political economy of food production.

Conference Committee

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Víctor Hernández-Sang, co-chair

PhD Candidate

Víctor Hernández-Sang is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology. He completed his master’s degree at UMD with a thesis focused on the performance of palos music in fiestas de misterios in the Dominican Republic and holds a B.A. in music from Luther College, Decorah, IA. His doctoral project examines the performance of gagá (Haitian Dominican music and dance) and racial discrimination in the Dominican Republic through ethnographic and archival research. In the summer of 2018, he received the Graduate School Summer Research Fellowship to start conducting field research for his dissertation. He was recently a fellow of the Latino Center at the Smithsonian Institution of the Latino Museum Studies Program. Hernández-Sang is the graduate assistant for the Latin American Studies Center’s 2020-21 academic year. Prior to UMD, he taught flute, ear training and English in his hometown of Santiago, Dominican Republic. In his free time, he enjoys film and digital photography.

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Keisha Allan

PhD Candidate

My name is Keisha Allan and I am a native of Trinidad and Tobago. I am currently a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature and my broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, I examine Caribbean literature by women of English, Spanish and French expression who deal extensively with the rewriting of the homeland to imagine ways to overcome social and patriarchal repression. My research seeks to investigate the ways in which normative constructions of the homeland are problematized and contested by Caribbean women writers of the late twentieth century.

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María Azar

PhD Student

Maria Cecilia Azar is a first year PhD student in the department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research explores the survival practices of queer diaspora communities in the Americas. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Maria Cecilia recently moved from Southern California where she received an MA in English from California State University, Los Angeles.

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Lisa Carney, PhD

Post-doctoral Associate, LASC

Lisa W. Carney is a Post-doctoral Associate for the Latin American Studies Center, as well as the coordinator of the Dissertation Success Program for the Graduate School Writing Center. She received her PhD in May 2020 from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, where she specialized in indigenous cultural production, contemporary Latin American literature and Quechua language narrative from the Andes and Amazon region. Her dissertation, “By the Authority of Dreams: Truth and Knowledge in Kichwa Muskuy Narratives” examined how verbal artistry and linguistic elements contribute to credibility and authoritative knowledge in Kichwa-speaking communities of the Ecuadorian tropical forest.

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Fernando Durán

PhD Student

Fernando Duran is a PhD student in the English department at the University of Maryland. He studies Latinx literature, U.S. Central American literature, and environmental justice. His current work centers on the intersections between Central American migration narratives and environmental crises. He received his MA in English from the City College of New York and his BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Lissette Escariz Ferrá

PhD Student

Lissette Escariz Ferrá is an English PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh focusing on Latinx, Caribbean, and Postcolonial literature. She was born and raised in La Habana Del Este, Cuba and has lived most of her time abroad in Miami, FL. In the Spring of 2018 Lissette graduated with a Master's in English from the University of Maryland, where she made LASC her home away from the Caribbean. She was LASC's 2018 Queer/Cuir Americas main conference artist and will once again take on the role for the center’s 2019 Huracán, Tormenta, Storm conference. Aside from her research and other graduate work, Lissette enjoys dancing Cuban salsa, painting watercolors, taking pictures, and spending time by the sea.

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Marco Polo Juárez Cruz

PhD Student

Marco Polo Juarez Cruz is a Ph.D. student in the Art History program at the University of Maryland College Park. He is studying the emergence and consolidation of abstraction in the distinct artistic groups across the Americas, and its relationship with cultural policies, museums, literature, and religion. Marco Polo received his BA in Architecture and his master’s degree in Art History, both from UNAM. He has collaborated in research projects of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas. Before enrolling at UMD, he was the Head of the Exhibitions Department in the Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares and participated in curatorial projects for the Fonart, in Mexico City.

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Gabrielle Tillenburg 

MA/PhD Student

Gabrielle is a MA/PhD student in the Art History department at the University of Maryland studying modern and contemporary Caribbean and diasporic art history. Her interests include artist activism in independence movements, interpretations of time in photographic media, and contemporary use of craft materials. Prior to enrolling at UMD, she worked as the Exhibitions Coordinator at Strathmore from 2015-2020. Her curatorial projects have included "Soft Serve" at Willow Street Gallery, public art installations at Torpedo Factory, and "Past Process" at Strathmore.

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Danielle LaPlace, co-chair

PhD Student

Danielle is a third-year student in the Women’s Studies, PhD program. Born and raised in St. Kitts and Nevis, Danielle moved to North Carolina to continue her studies, receiving a BA in French and a BA in International Studies from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2010. She was then granted an Endeavor Award by the Australian government and pursued a Master of Development Practice at the University of Queensland. She then returned to St. Kitts and Nevis, serving briefly as the Executive Officer in the Department of Gender Affairs where she had the opportunity to represent the country at the 2016 European Union-Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (EU-CELAC) Gender Equality and Women’s Economic Empowerment Seminar in Brussels, Belgium. She recently completed an MA in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) and her current work investigates public health and notions of racialized contagion.

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Nohely Alvarez

PhD Candidate

Nohely Alvarez is a Ph.D. Candidate in Urban Planning at the School of Architecture and Planning, and Preservation. Her focus and interests include the intersection of immigrant communities, transnational planning, participatory community building, social justice, gentrification, and equity development. She is particularly interested in advocacy and radical planning pedagogy in her field and thinking of ways the gap between practice and academia in planning can be improved. In her spare time, she likes learning about other cities, creating maps for side gigs, cooking, and playing with Son Cosita Seria (a DC-based Son Jarocho collective group).

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Jonathan Brower

PhD Candidate

Jonathan Brower is a doctoral candidate in the History Department. He graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 2010 with a BA in History and Near Eastern Studies. At the University of Maryland, Jonathan studies the French Revolution, with an emphasis on questions relating to religion, identity and the nation during the Terror. His dissertation argues that the cultural and religious policies of the Terror were actually part of a larger project of nation-building during the French Revolution. Besides his dissertation topic, Jonathan is also interested in questions relating to the transnational experience of revolution in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Finally, both within and outside academia, Jonathan is passionate about community organizing and labor rights.

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Sarah Dowman, PhD

Lecturer

Sarah Dowman is a Lecturer at the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. She earned her PhD from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland in 2019. Her research analyzes the relationships among art, resistance, contemporary activism, and pedagogy in the context of hemispheric queer Latinx and Latin American (sub)cultural production, practices, spaces, and communities. Her dissertation, titled “Change Is Sound: Resistance and Activism in Queer Latinx Punk Rock,” highlights intersectional subjectivities within queer Latinx punk rock, placing focus on the marginalized while decentering the punk rock genre and its history in a way that challenges dominant narratives that exclude and erase diversity within the subculture. She is also involved in the punk scene as a fan, active participant, and musician, which sparked her interest in politics, music, and art, and loves to experience the subculture’s transnational and transatlantic nature through travel.

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Sergio García Mejía

PhD Student

Sergio García Mejía is a Ph.D. student of the Civil Engineering department in the Center for Disaster Resilience at the University of Maryland (UMD). His research explores the intersections between infrastructure resilience, household recovery, disaster aid, and disaster management, explicitly concerning their manifestations in multi hazard-prone locations and vulnerable populations. Sergio graduated from Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala with a BA in Civil Engineering and then came to the US with a Fulbright grant to obtain an MSc in Civil & Environmental Engineering at UMD. Sergio has significant experience working in municipal and non-profit organizations in rural and semi-rural environments in Guatemala. In his free time, Sergio enjoys making music and pottery.

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Naette Yoko Lee

PhD Candidate

Naette Yoko Lee is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland (UMD) researching rhetorics of race. Her work considers the impact of commercial genetic testing on the maintenance of white supremacy in multiple global contexts. She has published an analysis of female Democratic candidacy campaigns in the 2018 U.S. mid-term election at the Rosenker Center for Political Communication and Civic Leadership. In 2019, her contextualization of the speech text of Native American tribal leader George Gillette was featured by the Recovering Democracy Archives project. Naette is a University of Maryland’s 2017 Flagship Fellow and 2003 winner of the University of the West Indies History Department’s Eric Williams Prize for Excellence in Capitalism and Slavery. She is also the recipient of an Ann G. Wiley Dissertation Fellowship from the UMD.

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Nancy Vera

PhD Candidate

Nancy Vera is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on Afro-Mexican folklore on both sides of the U.S/Mexican border. She examines how the Afro-Mexican trickster figure Uncle Rabbit has recently transformed into a border crosser figure that disrupts settler colonial narratives.

Conference Credits

Lissette Escariz Ferrá

Conference Artist

Nohely Alvarez

Technical Assistance

Julia Hernández Sang

Digital Artist

More info

Fernando Durán

Technical Assistance

Gabrielle Tillenburg

Website Development

Technical Assistance

Sergio García Mejía

Technical Assistance

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