EXHIBITORS
Organizers, Discussants, Presenters, and Moderators
Danielle LaPlace
LACS Intern, Moderator
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Danielle is a third-year Ph. D student in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. 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.
Eric Tomalá
LACS Assistant Director
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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.
Isabella Alcañiz
LACS Director
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Dr. Isabella Alcañiz is an Associate Professor of the Department of Government and Politics and Director of the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center, University of Maryland (UMD). Professor Alcañiz studies the politics of climate change, social inequality, disaster policy, and gender with a focus on Latin America and Latinx residents of the United States. Her research has been published in Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Cleaner Production, Water Policy, Environmental Science & Policy, World Politics, and the Latin American Research Review. Her book, Environmental and Nuclear Networks in the Global South: How Skills Shape International Cooperation, was published by Cambridge University Press. She received a PhD from the Department of Political Science at Northwestern University and a Licenciatura in International Relations from the Universidad de Belgrano (Argentina). She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of Environmental Politics and Global Environmental Politics. Dr. Alcañiz is a member of the Latinx and immigration advocacy organization CASA de Maryland, where she works with immigrant youth and sits on the Leadership Council of the youth program Mi Espacio.
Jallicia Jolly
Presenter
Dr. Jallicia Jolly is a writer, reproductive justice practitioner, and incoming Assistant Professor in American Studies and Black Studies at Amherst College. Dr. Jolly researches and teaches on Black women’s health, grassroots activism, and reproductive justice; intersectionality and the transnational politics of HIV/AIDS care and activism in the U.S. and Caribbean; Black feminist health science, reproductive governance, and Black motherhood. Dr. Jolly's first book manuscript, Ill Erotics: Black Caribbean Women and Self-Making in the Time of HIV/AIDS, now under contract with the University of California Press, is an ethnography that explores how the politics of HIV care and self-making meet in young Black women’s everyday confrontations with illness and inequality in this unique pandemic-inflected era of HIV/AIDS in postcolonial Jamaica. Currently a Visiting Researcher at Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University, Dr. Jolly connects her research to tailored community interventions that advance equity, systemic change & community-building within and beyond U.S. borders.
As a reproductive justice organizer and community-based researcher, Dr. Jolly is invested in the power of communal problem-solving against illness and inequality. She intervenes in conventional biomedical approaches to HIV by centering interventions that are holistic, culturally-rooted, and community-oriented. As a co-organizer of the racial equity and reproductive justice group, MA COVID-19 Maternal Equity Coalition, she develops and implements evidence-based interventions to improve Black birth outcomes and health care access while combating structural racism and reproductive violence in the health care system. Dr. Jolly is a 2022 Ford Postdoctoral Fellow and will be a Visiting Professor at Yale University's American Studies department.
Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia
Presenter
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Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia (Santurce, Puerto Rico 1963). Poeta, ensayista, crítico. En 2002 gana el Premio de poesía del Pen Club de Puerto Rico por sus cuadernos de juventud El hilo para el marisco/Cuaderno de los envíos. Es autor de los libros de poesía: La caja negra (1996), Libro del sigiloso [Premio Creative and Performing Arts de la Universidad de Maryland, 2006] y El cuerpo del milagro (2016). Algunos de sus libros de crítica son Fulguración del espacio: Letras e imaginario institucional de la Revolución cubana 1960-1971 [Latin American Studies Association-Premio Iberoamericano 2002], La máquina de la salsa: Tránsitos del sabor (2005, 2021segunda edición revisada y aumentada) y La hoja de mar (:) Efecto archipiélago I (2016) y De la queda(era): Imagen, tiempo y detención en Puerto Rico (2021). Ha obtenido becas de la Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation y de la John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Es profesor de literatura caribeña y latinoamericana en el Departamento de Español y Portugués de la Universidad de Maryland.
John E. Drabinski
Discussant
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John E. Drabinski is Professor in the Department of African American Studies, with a joint appointment in the Department of English. His writing and teaching focus on the philosophical dimensions of the black Atlantic intellectual tradition, with particular emphasis on postcolonial theory, the francophone Caribbean, and the United States. He has published four single-authored books, including most recently Glissant and the Middle Passage: Philosophy, Beginning, Abyss (Minnesota 2019) and Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other (Edinburgh 2012), which was awarded the Frantz Fanon Book Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He has edited books and journal issues dedicated to key figures in Atlantic thought, including Frantz Fanon, Jean-Luc Godard, and Édouard Glissant, as well as dozens of articles on themes of memory, language, culture, and politics. He is currently completing a book length study of James Baldwin entitled ‘So Unimaginable a Price’: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic (under contract with Northwestern University Press) and a short book on postmodern motifs in afro-Caribbean thought titled What is the Afro-Postmodern?
Keisha Allan
LACS Postdoctoral Associate, Discussant, Moderator
Dr. Keisha Allan is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She serves as a postdoctoral fellow in the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center at the University of Maryland. Recently graduated with a Ph.D. from the department of English at the University of Maryland, her broad area of interest is twentieth-century Caribbean literature. Within this field, she examines issues of migration, national belonging, race, and cultural and racial configurations in Caribbean women’s fiction.
Lauren K. Alleyne
Presenter
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Lauren K. Alleyne (she/her) is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014) and Honeyfish (2019), as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and The Caribbean Writer, among others. Her most recent honors include nominations for a 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, Alleyne currently resides in Harrisonburg, VA, where she is a professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Get more information about Lauren at www.laurenkalleyne.com and follow her at @poetLKA on social media
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Lisa J. Latouche
Presenter
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Lisa J Latouche is a Dominican writer, and repeat winner of the Nature Island Literary Festival Short Story Competition. In 2020, she was awarded a Citation by the Office of the President Borough of Brooklyn, City of New York for her literary achievements. She emerged finalist in the 2020 Elizabeth Nunez BCLF Caribbean-American Writers Prize and her work was shortlisted for the 2016 Small Axe Literary Competition. Publications include White Wall Review, Leavings Literary Magazine, Montage Domnik among others. Lisa is a graduate of the University of Leicester and a former Writer in Residence at the University of the West Indies St. Augustine in Trinidad. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland and her first novel is close to completion.
Nick Nesbitt
Presenter
Nick Nesbitt received his PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures (French) with a Minor in Brazilian Portuguese from Harvard University. He has previously taught at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and at Miami University (Ohio), and in 2003-4 he was a Mellon Fellow at the Cornell University Society for the Humanities. He is the author of Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant (Liverpool 2013); Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Virginia 2008); and Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Virginia 2003). He is also the editor of The Concept in Crisis: Reading Capital Today (Duke 2017), Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution (Verso, 2008); co-editor of Revolutions for the Future: May '68 and the Prague Spring (Suture 2020); and co-editor (with Brian Hulse) of Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music (Ashgate 2010). For 2019-21, he is the recipient of a GAÄŒR grant as Senior Researcher at the Philosophical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
Ryan Long
Moderator
Ryan Long is Associate Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Queer Exposures: Sexuality and Photography in the Fiction and Poetry of Roberto Bolaño (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Fictions of Totality: The Mexican Novel, 1968, and the National-Popular State (Purdue, 2008). He is currently writing a book titled The Poetics of Place and Displacement: Hannes Meyer and Postrevolutionary Mexico. He also edits the Mexican prose fiction section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies.
Stephanie Bent
Producer
Stephanie Bent is a PhD candidate in the Higher Education, Student Affairs and International Education Policy program with a concentration in student affairs. She holds a EdM in Anthropology and Education from Teachers College-Columbia University, a MS in Higher Education-Student Affairs from Florida State University, and a BS in Applied Mathematics from Georgia Tech. While at Teachers College, Stephanie conducted research about ethnic identity construction among Caribbean-Americans. She has worked in student affairs in the United States with experiences in various functional areas: residential life, leadership development, first year programs, sophomore programs, living learning communities, student conduct, and academic advising. While working at Valdosta State University, she served as the advisor for the Caribbean Students Association. Her research interests include student affairs practice in the Caribbean, identity and leadership development of Caribbean tertiary students living in and outside the Caribbean, understanding how Caribbean tertiary education contributes to national development, decolonizing research methods, and decolonizing higher education. Her goal as a scholar is to work with Caribbean educators to develop educational experiences which help students become aware of the way colonialism and globalization influence how they view themselves and the world. As well as she would like to work alongside Caribbean educators to develop educational initiatives to prepare students to participate in the journey of decolonization within Caribbean societies.
Presenter
Thurka Sangaramoorthy is a cultural and medical anthropologist and public health researcher with 22 years of experience conducting community-engaged ethnographic research, including rapid assessments, among vulnerable populations in the United States, Africa, and Latin America/Caribbean. Her work is broadly concerned with power and subjectivity in global economies of care. She has worked at this intersection on diverse topics, including global health and migration, HIV/STD, and environmental health disparities. She is the author of two books: Rapid Ethnographic Assessments: A Practical Approach and Toolkit for Collaborative Community Research (Routledge, 2020) and Treating AIDS: Politics of Difference, Paradox of Prevention (Rutgers, 2014), and has two books in press: She’s Positive: The Extraordinary Lives of Black Women Living with HIV (Aevo, 2022) and Immigration and the Landscape of Care in Rural America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023). Dr. Sangaramoorthy is Co-Chair of the American Anthropological Association’s Members Programmatic Advisory and Advocacy Committee and a Board member of the Society for Medical Anthropology; she serves as Associate Editor of Public Health Reports, Editorial Board Member of American Anthropologist, and the inaugural Social, Behavioral, and Qualitative Research Section Editor for PLOS Global Public Health. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco, her M.P.H. from Columbia University, and is currently Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland and Affiliate Associate Professor at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia.
Thurka Sangaramoorthy
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Víctor Hernández Sang
LACS Graduate Assistant, Moderator
Graduate Assistant Víctor Hernández Sang is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology in the School of Music. His doctoral project examines the performance of gagá (Haitian-Dominican music and dance) and issues of race, immigration, and racial discrimination in the Dominican Republic. At the University of Maryland, he also completed his MA with a thesis focused on the performance of palos music in fiestas de misterios in the Dominican Republic. Before coming to UMD, he received his BA from Luther College, Decorah, IA in music (flute performance) and taught flute, ear training, and English in his hometown, Santiago, Dominican Republic.
Gabrielle Tillenburg
Web Manager
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Gabrielle is a MA/PhD student studying modern and contemporary Caribbean and diasporic art under the guidance of Dr. Abigail McEwen. 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. As a 2019-2020 Faith Flanagan Fellow with Art Table DC, she co-authored "In Defense of Art," a zine documenting visual arts in the Washington, DC area. She holds a BFA in Film from the University of Central Florida. Her thesis film, Fantasy Land, examined the impermanence of memory through essay film conventions. Fantasy Land exhibited at festivals and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, and her production work was awarded competitive grants from Kodak and the Coup de Coeur at Cannes Film Festival.