Sarah Amador
saa310@nyu.edu

Sarah Arantza Amador entered the PhD program in 2005. She holds a BA with Honors in Literature (with concentrations in Spanish and Latin American literatures, and creative writing) and Philosophy from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is presently working on her dissertation proposal on Horror, in relation to war and history, in 19th century and contemporary Spanish literature and visual culture. Her academic interests include zombies, ghosts and werewolves, graves, hauntings and the past, war and the monstrous-feminine. Sarah has trouble watching horror movies alone.This has made research difficult.

Graciela Báez
gmb281@nyu.edu

Graciela entered the PhD program in 2005, after a long and successful career as an Executive Recruiter for a private boutique recruiting firm in New York City. She received her Bachelor's degree in Latin American and US Latino/a Literature from Fordham University. Graciela's areas of research are Contemporary Latin American literature particularly from, Mexico, the Caribbean, the Andes and Brazil. She is also interested in Indigenous cosmology, Hindu doctrines, Afro-Yoruban & Candomble religions, as well as internal feminine mysticism. Her thesis will explore the Goddesses of the Americas -the Great Mother and Eco-feminism.

Lena Burgos-Lafuente
lenabu@nyu.edu

Lena Burgos-Lafuente specializes in Modern Transatlantic Literatures, with a focus on Spanish and Caribbean Poetics and Literary Politics from the 1940s and 1950s. She is particularly interested in the relations between poetry and philosophy. Her dissertation studies the notion and practice of the untimely as it appears in exilic texts written in the Caribbean by María Zambrano, Pedro Salinas and Juan Ramón Jiménez, and in Caribbean writers Tomás Blanco, José Lezama Lima, Francisco Matos Paoli and Luis Palés Matos. She is a diehard fan of Ramito, “El Cantor de la Montaña” and Fernanda de Utrera.

Vanessa Ceia
vanessa.ceia@nyu.edu

After having studied at the University of Toronto, Vanessa Ceia completed her undergraduate studies in English and Spanish Literatures with High Distinction and nearly a dozen academic awards under her belt before moving onto graduate studies at McGill and NYU. Her research interests include sub and counter-culture theory, memory/ amnesia in historical representation, fetishism, the body and visual culture in contemporary Spain and Portugal. She has published several commentaries about the identity crises of first generation Luso- Canadians, presented at academic conferences and completed a Master's thesis entitled Amor, lesbianismo, niñas buenas, y putas: las protagonistas de Lucía Etxebarría, which focuses on issues of gender and sexuality in the works of Etxebarría. She is currently working on visual culture and oral histories of the Movida Madrileña.

Kahlil Chaar
kc40@nyu.edu

Kahlil Chaar is a fourth year student. He holds a BA in Comparative Literature from the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras and a MA in Comparative Literature from the University of Chicago. His interests are, in no particular order, modern and contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis and visual culture. He has presented papers on melancholy and coloniality in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab, and on abjection in José Donoso's El lugar sin límites. He is currently working on his dissertation proposal on 19th century Cuban and Puerto Rican letrados, coloniality and non-national imaginaries.

Eunha Choi
ehc223@nyu.edu

Eunha Choi. Currently working on prospectus. Chief interests are: 20th Century urban Latin American literature, Lima, cultural articulations of time and space, history and production of critical discourse, literary articulations of urban mythical imaginings.

Christopher van Ginhoven Rey
cvg210@nyu.edu

Christopher van Ginhoven Rey is a third year student in the department. Born in Peru, he received his B.A. and his M.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College. He taught literature at the high school level in San Francisco for a year and then lived in Buenos Aires before coming to New York. A student of Early Modern Peninsular and Spanish American literature, he is interested in mysticism and in the literature of the Discovery. His dissertation is a comparative study of the notion of obedience as it appears in the writings of Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa de Avila, and Renee Descartes. He is also interested in logic and in the relation between philosophy and literature, and is an avid reader of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. In 2005 he published a novel, "La evasion," under the Matalamanga seal in Peru. He has also contributed articles for magazines, and was partly responsible for a series of anarchist pamphlets.

Ysette Guevara
ysette.guevara@nyu.edu

Ysette Guevara holds a BA in Latin American Studies from Wesleyan University. Her research interests include intellectual history, romanticism, political philosophy, and the nineteenth century. She is currently working on a project on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi.

María del Mar Gómez
mdm10@nyu.edu

María del Mar Gómez is a third year student from Spain and a writer. She came to NYU after spending a year as a writing-fellow at the Residencia de Estudiantes (Madrid) where she completed a play "Fuga Mundi" (II Beckett Theater Prize 2007). She has a MA in Literature Theory (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) and two BA’s: in Sociology and Journalism. She is a student of Early Modern and contemporary Peninsular literature, interested in the relationship between prologues and death.

Nathalie Bragadir
ncb258@nyu.edu

Nathalie Bragadir is a first year student and holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and MA in Spanish Language & Literature from Boston University. After graduating from Penn in 2004, she spent the following year in Valparaíso, Chile on a Fulbright Teaching Assistantship grant. Her research interests include 20th Century Latin American Literature with an emphasis on female authors from Argentina and Chile.

Nicholas Jones
nrj208@nyu.edu

Nicholas Jones is a second year student who came to NYU from Haverford College with a BA, with Honors, in Spanish Literature and two concentrations in Africana Studies and Latin American & Iberia Studies. His scholarly interests explore the following: (1) articulations of empire, “race,” and gender-sexuality in the literature and cultural history of early modern Spain and colonial Spanish America; (2) Transatlantic relations between Iberia and its colonies in colonial Spanish America; (3) “race” and sexuality vis-à-vis black Africans in Iberia; Afro-Hispanic narratives from colonial and Renaissance archival documents and Afro-Hispanic literature; and, (4) poetics and stylizations of the body vis-à-vis clothing, cosmetics, and medicine.

Marta Kaluza
mjk394@nyu.edu

Marta Kaluza is a third year student who came to NYU with an MA in Spanish Language & Literature from Middlebury College in Madrid, Spain. She is currently working on her dissertation on Witold Gombrowicz as the trans-atlantic figure of the 20th Century. Her scholarly interests include 20th Century Latin American Literature with emphasis on Argentina and Brazil, 20th Century European Literature and Philosophy, and Psychoanalysis. She has taught Beginner's and Intermediate Spanish at NYU and a summer course at Loyola University Chicago.

Patricia López
pl751@nyu.edu

Patricia joined the program in 2007. She has studied in various universities and holds the following degrees: B.A. with Honours in Modern Languages (07/2003, Liverpool John Moores University, UK); Licenciatura (B.A.) en Traducción e Interpretación (07/2002, Universidad de Granada, Spain); Maîtrise (B.A.) en Langues étrangères appliqués (11/2003, Université de Provence Aix-Marseille, France); DEA (M.A.) en Litérature comparée (06/2004, Université de Paris 7); and, DEA (M.A.) en Teoría de la traducción y estudios interculturales (06/2005, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona).  He has published book chapters and articles in various European books and journals. In 2005, she published a book entitled Autotraducción y recreación literaria (IEA). She is a member of the research team AUTOTRAD at Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona. Research interest: contemporary novel and autobiography in Spain, Portugal, France and the US, autofiction (faction) and French theory, untraslatability, translation and hermeneutics, invisibility and translation, translation and literarary re-creation. She has received a number of grants and fellowships -the most recent being the NYU Global Fellowship (NYU in Paris) awarded in spring 2008.

Amaury Leopoldo Sosa
als520@nyu.edu

Amaury Leopoldo Sosa is a second year student born in the Dominican Republic and raised in the city of New York. He holds a BA in Literary Studies from Middlebury College. His interests are early modern literature: La Celestina, El Lazarillo, Don Quijote, contemporary Latin American discourse: Severo Sarduy, Pedro Lemebel, Néstor Perlongher, Brazilian modernism, Brazilian cinema, literary theory and critical social theory. He has worked on silence in Yerma and La Celestina, transvestism in Sirena Selena vestida de pena, Madame Satã and in Los empeños de una casa and has also worked on the performance of AIDS in the chronicles of Lemebel and the visual performances of Las yeguas del apocalipsis. He is presently working on queer narratology and the Lazarillo and is exploring the idea of fame, name/naming and mis/recognition in early modern Spanish literature.

Angela Marino-Segura
angela.marino@nyu.edu 

Marino Segura joined the department in the fall of 2006 as a doctoral student of Spanish and Performance Studies. Her interests include performance, theatre, politics, religion, popular culture and film of the Americas. She studied dance, theatre and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was a Fulbright student fellow (1998-99) of performance and dramatic literature in Venezuela. She completed her Master's degree in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico (2006), after founding and directing an arts festival known as La Voz: Festival of the Americas (1998, 2000). Her current research areas include fiesta and carnival, Afro-Caribbean literature, 18th & 19th c. revolutionary movements, visual arts, theatre and political performance in Latin America, particularly Venezuela, Mexico and Cuba.

Felipe Martínez Pinzón
felipe.martinez@nyu.edu

Felipe is a third year Phd student who came to NYU with a double B.A in Literature and Law from Los Andes University in Bogotá. His interests include Latin American literature and film of the Cold War, more specifically in Colombia and Perú. Topics include representations of the intellectual, defeat as narrative, jungle and utopia, geography, guerrilla warfare, Foco Theory, censorship, subversive writing and reading, communist aesthetics and rhetoric, noir fiction, nation as discourse and hegemony. He also writes poetry. Recently published a book called “Sólo queda gritar”(Bogotá, 2006).

Melcion Mateu
melcion@nyu.edu

Melcion Mateu is a second year student who earned his BA in Spanish Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and his MA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. His research interests include the Avant-Garde and the Spanish Civil War. He is the author of three books of poetry and has translated into Catalan authors such as John leCarré, Michael Ondaatje and John Ashbery. He teaches Catalan at NYU.

Richard Parra Ortiz
richard.parra@nyu.edu

Richard Parra Ortiz is a second year student. His interests include: Love of reading, Aesthetics, Rhetorics, Imaginative Literature, Eloquence, Poetics and Philology; Law and Colonial Latin American Literature; Criollismo in the Peruvian Novel of the 20th Century; Popular Andean urban culture; Culture and war in the Peru of the 80´s. Anarchism, Cynicism, Atheism, Scatology (skatós); Dyonisiac Literature; Experience, Originality and Style; Critique of Latin American populisms, left-wing moralism and the demagogic reason; Critique of christianism and the spiritual conquest of America. Anti multiculturalism, Macho Studies; Fredrich Engels, Erich Auerbach, Karl Popper and Harold Bloom; Westerns and war films. Publications: “Altazor y el fin de la historia” Casa de citas No 2. Lima 2005. “La vanguardia era un grupo muy simpático” (Entrevista a Mirko Lauer). Casa de citas No 3. Lima 2006. “La violencia del tiempo: el desprecio por la mujer indígena y la nostalgia del poder hispánico”. Casa de citas No 3. Lima 2006. “Conversación en la Catedral: corrupción, desclasamineto y crisis del orden criollo”. In press.

Alexander Pérez-Heredia
alexander.ph@nyu.edu

Alexander Pérez-Heredia is a PhD student who earned his MA in Spanish Language and Literature from the Universidad de La Habana. He has worked as a researcher at the Department of Literary Studies at the Instituto de Literatura y Lingüística (1997-2001); professor of Cuban Studies at the Instituto Superior de Arte (2000-2001); and professor at the Department of Arts and Letters of the Universidad de La Habana (2001-2003). He researched, compiled and published a work entitled Epistolario de Nicolás Guillén (2002), and is also the author of numerous essays and articles about literature and fine arts. His research interests include Caribbean and Spanish literature and visual arts in the 20th century.

Romina Pistacchio
rp1237@nyu.edu

Romina is a first year Ph.D. student. She holds a B.A in Hispanic Language & Literature from Universidad de Chile and a M.A in Literature from the same University. Before coming to NYU she spend five years working as a researcher at Centro de Estudios Culturales Latinoamericanos (U. de Chile) and taught in a Secondary School. Her main interests include Southern Cone Intellectual History, Critical Theory and Marxism and Latin-American Avangard. Her M.A Thesis “Una perspectiva para ver: el Intelectual Crítico de Beatriz Sarlo”, was publish by Corregidor (Buenos Aires, Argentina) on 2007.

Sebastian Reyes
sr1530@nyu.edu

Sebastian Reyes works on sexuality and violence in Latin American literature. As an undergraduate in Chile he wrote his dissertation on the recent feminist Chilean movement. He did his MA at University of Pittsburgh, and has been researching authors like José Donoso, Mauricio Wacquez, Copi and Osvaldo Lamborghini. He is also interested in narratives of conquest and colonial literatures, with particular emphasis on sexuality issues.

Carlos Eduardo Rojas
cer322@nyu.edu

Carlos Rojas is a first year Ph.D. student. He holds a B.A. with highest honors in Literature from the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia) and a M.A. in Latin American Studies from Universitetet i Bergen (Norway). His research interests include J. L. Borges, autobiography, subjectivity and language, and Latin American essay. In 2007, he was awarded the Premio Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española. Publications: “La mascara y la palabra: Problemas del sujeto y el lenguaje en la escritura autobiográfica de Borges” (2002), “ ‘El acercamiento a Almotásim’ y el efecto de contaminación” (2007).

Claudia Salazar-Jiménez
claudia.salazar@nyu.edu

Claudia Salazar came to NYU from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (Lima). Among other awards, she has received the Susan Eliakim Simon Scholarship for Sephardic Studies and the GSAS Pre Doctoral Fellowship. She was the director of the literary magazine Fuegos de Arena and now is a member of the Editorial Board of the on-line magazine El hablador. She is working in her dissertation about the Autobiographical discourses through Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula. Her research interests and publications include: Modern and Contemporary Latin American Literature and Culture, Literary Theory, Autobiography, Gender Studies, and the intersections between Literature, History and Memory. She also received the Advance Certificate in Creative Writing.

Emmy Smith Ready
eas424@nyu.edu

Emmy Smith Ready entered the program in 2006 with an MA in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Virginia. She has a BA with Highest Honors also from the University of Virginia in Spanish and Foreign Affairs with a Minor in Italian. Emmy's scholarly interests include Catalan literature and culture we well as pedagogy.

Sarah Thomas
slt276@nyu.edu

Sarah Thomas entered the program in 2005, coming to NYU from Harvard University with a BA in Literature (Spanish and English). As an undergraduate, she wrote an honors thesis on the poetry of Rosario Castellanos, studied in Madrid, and traveled throughout Spain and Costa Rica as a researcher-writer for the travel guide Let's Go. Her dissertation explores representations of children and child subjectivity in literature and film dealing with the Spanish Civil War and Franco period.  Research interests also include: relationships of memory, trauma, and civil conflict; gender and sexuality; fiction and autobiography.

Sarah J. Townsend
sjt239@nyu.edu

Sarah J. Townsend entered the Ph.D. program in 2003 with a B.A. in Spanish and English from the University of Iowa. She is the co-editor of Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theater & Performance (University of Michigan, 2008) and has articles forthcoming in Revista iberoamericana and Modernism/Modernity.  She is currently completing a dissertation on theatre, mass publics, and avant-garde intellectuals in Mexico and Brazil in the twenties and thirties.

Smita Tripathi
st521@nyu.edu

Smita Tripathi is a fifth year doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Born in India, she majored in Romance Languages and did her Master's in Comparative Literature (both at Dartmouth College). Smita's interests include twentieth-century Latin American and Caribbean literatures, and 'postcolonial' and women's studies. Her doctoral dissertation focuses on works by women authors of the Caribbean and Brazil and their writing under censorship, particularly in the 1930s and 40s.

Javier Uriarte
javur@nyu.edu

Javier Uriarte is a fifth-year student. He holds a BA from the Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, where he worked as a Teaching Assistant in Latin American and English Literatures. In 2004, just before coming to NYU, he spent a semester studying as an undergraduate at the departments of Hispanic Studies and English at the Royal Holloway, University of London. During 2008 he spent the Spring semester at NYU in Madrid, working as a TA within the Master’s Program, teaching 19TH and 20th century Latin American and Spanish literatures. He is spending the 2008 fall semester studying at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil, where his is taking PhD courses and writing one of the chapters of his dissertation. He has taught Spanish Language at NYU for five semesters, at different levels. He has also published many articles and reviews in Brecha  and several other Uruguayan weekly newspapers, and translations from English to Spanish. He has contributed with articles to two books published in Uruguay (its titles are “fechas y la invención del sistema simbólico nacional en América Latina” and “Nomadismo y configuración identitaria en The Purple Land”), and two more articles are forthcoming in 2009, also as part of a book, in Perú (“Viajes, nación y fundación en el siglo XIX: Humboldt y Merlin en Cuba”) and the United States (“Tyranny and Foundation: Appropriations of the Hero and Re- readings of the Nation in Augusto Roa Bastos and Jean-Claude Fignolé”). He has delivered papers at different conferences in Uruguay, Argentina and the United States. He is proficient in Spanish, English, Italian, Portuguese and French. He is currently working on his dissertation, in which he analyzes different scenes of dialogue between travel writing and the consolidation of Nation-States in late 19th century Latin America, connected to episodes of political violence, examining how some travel subjects relate, through their representations, to the nation-state apparatus and its politics of space. In order to do this he will adopt a comparative perspective, concentrating on specific scenes of travel in Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay. Other interests include Latin American reception (translations, rewritings, critical and creative approaches in general) of English-language texts (he has worked on the first reception of James Joyce's Ulysses during the 1920s in Argentina, Perú and Mexico, and about Jorge Luis Borges' translation of Bartleby, the scrivener, by Herman Melville).

Pia Leighton
piam@nyu.edu

Pia was born and raised in Santiago, Chile, and entered the PhD program in 2004. She graduated as a “Licenciada en Letras y Lingüística Hispanoamericanas” from Universidad Católica de Chile (2003) with the belief that coming to a graduate program in the US would deepen her knowledge about literature and poetry. She has also lived in Oslo and Valparaíso, and has been a fellow student at Boston University (2005) and UIMP (2006) in Spain. She is currently writing her dissertation under the title of Parrapoesía, a book about the life and work of the Chilean anti-poet Nicanor Parra (1914). Her scholarly interests are fundamentally freethinking and Irony.