“Writing Islands: Space and Identity in the Transnational Cuban Archipelago”
Elena Lahr-Vivaz

Elena Lahr-Vivaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies at Rutgers University-Newark, where she specializes in Latin American literature and film. Her first book, Mexican Melodrama: Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave, is forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press. She is now beginning work on her second book project, in which she investigates how Cuban poets, novelists, and essayists attempt to forge new connections with readers in the 1990s and 2000s and how they construct transnational, archipelagic spaces for these readers that both encompass and exceed their texts.

“Twentieth-Century Chinese Caribbean Intimacies and Models of Progress”
Kathy López

Kathy López is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her research and teaching focus on the historical intersections between Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean, postemancipation Caribbean societies, race and ethnicity in the Americas, and international migration. Her book Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) examines Chinese migrants in Cuba from the mid-nineteenth century to the present through archival and ethnographic research in Cuba, China, and the United States. She is also an editor of Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, a new book series from Palgrave Macmillan.