DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH & PORTUGUESE

 Mariana Barreto '24

Mariana Barreto received her B.A. from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru in Sociology. Her interests include Cultural Theory and Studies, Visual Culture, Psychoanalysis, Politics, and Gender Studies.

Alicia Núñez '23

Alicia V. Nuñez is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She completed her PhD at Northwestern University in 2023. Alicia examines the intersections of childhood with lived migratory experiences in literature, visual, and music culture.  Her work focuses on migrant children and the diverse ways migrants tend to survive under institutional radars, in the shadows. In migration studies, Alicia’s work explores immigration policy and detention procedures in the United States and in Mexico. As a Central Americanist, Alicia explored how “problem child” narratives have been used to historically depict the Central American region. More broadly, Alicia’s interdisciplinary projects dialogue with global issues such as mass displacement due to climate change and mass incarceration. 

Alicia has a lifelong passion for teaching and values non-hierarchical methods of instruction in the classroom. Alicia has taught at Northwestern, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and UChicago. Previously, she worked with the Northwestern Prison Education Program as director and program coordinator at Cook County Jail and various youth detention centers with the Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice. 

Johan Gotera '23

Ana Lydia Gómez Hernández '23

Ana Lydia Gómez Hernández has obtained her M.A. at Northwestern University in 2023 and received her B.A. in English from Florida International University, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation- HSI Pathways to the Professoriate Fellow. Her interests include twentieth & twenty-first century Caribbean and Latin American Literature, cultural identity, memory, and queer theory.

Iván Pérez '22

Iván Pérez is an Acquisitions Coordinator at Northwestern University Press. He completed his PhD at Northwestern in 2022 with dissertation titled "La Cotidianidad y la novela gráfica latinoamericana". He received his B.A. in Public Communications from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, and an M.A. in English Literature from the same institution. He then worked as a college professor and journalist. He has published book and film reviews online. He also co-edited a book collecting short stories and poems by young Puerto Rican writers, including some of his own texts. In 2018, Editorial Disonante published his first poetry chapbook, titled Para restarse.  His main research interests lie in 20th century and contemporary Latin American, Caribbean and latinx U.S. comic books and graphic novels, especially those that depict the everyday lives of these subjects and their national or transnational environments, issues of race, gender or diaspora.  

Catalina Rodríguez '22

Catalina Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor (CLTA) in the Department of Language Studies of the University of Toronto Mississauga.  She completed her PhD at Northwestern in 2022 with a dissertation titled "Writing Like a Woman: Gendered Pseudonyms in Nineteenth-century Latin America (1830-1899)". Her dissertation studies the role of pseudonyms in the regulation and creation of gendered practices and social concepts in nineteenth-century Latin America. Her project questions the figure of the author through the lens of feminist theory, drawing on a mix of archival, literary, visual and journalistic texts. She also has interests in Laura Mendez de Cuenca's (1853-1928) transnational journalism and on the relation between Latin American 19th century studies and Latino Modernism. Catalina's research has been published in the Latin American Literary Review, the Chilean magazineTaller de letras. 

José Delpino '22

José was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University in 2022-2023 academic year. He completed his PhD at Northwestern University in 2022 defending his dissertation, "Contra-depuraciones: Estética materialista, neovanguardia y geopolítica en Latinoamérica". He holds Bachelor’s Degree in Literature from Universidad Central de Venezuela (Caracas, 2005) and a Master’s Degree in Latin American Literature from Universidad Simón Bolívar (Caracas, 2014). He has taught courses and seminars on literature, literature theory and writing in both universities and he has experience in publishing projects. Presently, his research interests include varied forms of contemporary subjectivity, twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature and culture, biopolitics, and critical theory. His doctoral research is focused in the study of Venezuelan cultural productions and their political and aesthetical responses to the violent trauma of the country modernization between 1920 and 1970.

Zorimar Rivera Montes '22

Zorimar is an Assistant Professor of Latinx Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She completed her PhD at Northwestern University in 2022 defending her dissertation, "¿Quién le debe a quién?: Debt and Coloniality in Contemporary Puerto Rican Culture." The dissertation examines contemporary cultural production in Puerto Rico and how it has transformed—and been transformed by—the debt crisis and coloniality. Her objects of study include literature, popular music, and performance. Her research and teaching focuses on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and Caribbean cultures with relation to neoliberalism, colonialism, labor, and finance. Her research has been published in Latino Studies and Istor.

Leonardo Gil Gómez is an Associate Professor of the Department of Literature at Universidad Autonoma de Bucaramanga—UNAB. He joined the undergraduate program and the upcoming MFA in literature faculty.

Previously, Leonardo was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. He completed his PhD at Northwestern University in 2021. His dissertation, "La conspiración de las gramíneas: Estrategias de la literatura y cultura visual latinoamericanas para una crítica de la plantación" explores how contemporary fiction and visual arts represent and expose the violent conditions of living and working in contemporary monocultures across the Americas.

Leonardo received an MFA in Creative Writing from Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a B.Ed. from Universidad Distrital "Francisco José de Caldas". His work combines creative writing, academic research, and publishing. His first fiction book Celebraciones (2018) received a national grant for novel authors by the Colombian Ministry of Culture. He also contributed to the collective fiction-historical memory project Vidas de historia, una memoria literaria de la Organización Femenina Popular (2016). He is a co-founding member and editor at the Colombian independent press Himpar Editores.

Carlos Gustavo Halaburda '21

Carlos Gustavo Halaburda is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at The University of Toronto.

His current book manuscript, The Erotics of Supremacy: Melodrama and the Queer Futures of Whiteness in Belle Époque Latin America, examines how the criollo elites associated whiteness with heteronormativity and reproductive futurity in their literary experiments, including novels, medical studies, crónicas, and plays. The book argues that a series of literary and psychiatric fictions recurred to melodramatic tropes about purity, honor, and dignity to produce whiteness as a differential physiognomic and anatomic condition thus elevating white criollos over social groups deemed ‹‹uncivilized››.

His peer-reviewed articles have appeared in journals such as Taller de Letras and Latin American Theatre Review. He has upcoming articles to be published by Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Symposium, and Metales Pesados. With Nathalie Bouzaglo, he co-edited an annotated introduction to the re-edition of Venezuela’s first naturalist novel Débora (1884) by Tomás Michelena (Himpar eds., 2020). Research for these projects has drawn financial support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Berlin IberoAmerikanisches Institut, the Sexualities Project at Northwestern, and the Roberta Buffet Institute for Global Affairs.

Cintia Kozonoi Vezzani '21

Cintia Kozonoi Vezzani is a scholar and translator. In 2021 she received the English Pen Translates Award for The Bankruptcy (A Falência) by Júlia Lopes de Almeida. This translation will be published by UCL Press. Her essay, “Querida amiga, querido amante, cara leitora: Mulheres e Cartas em O Marido da Adúltera (1882) e Correio da Roça (1913)” will be featured in the forthcoming collection Uma história feminista da literatura brasileira. Recently, Cintia worked as an assistant for Northwestern’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, organizing the event “Indigenous Struggles to Preserve Their Land in Brazil.” This roundtable featured indigenous leaders and scholars of Brazilian history and culture.
At Northwestern, Cintia completed her dissertation “Prohibited Pleasures: Female Literacy, Sex and Adultery in Turn-of-the-Century Brazilian Fiction.” Cintia was part of the inaugural group of Northwestern University students to participate in the Dissertation Proposal Development (DPD) Program organized by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) in collaboration with other American universities. With generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and The Graduate School at Northwestern University, Cintia conducted research in Portugal, France, Germany, and Brazil. She holds a B.A. from the Universidade de São Paulo, was an exchange student at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 (2011-2012), a fellow of the Paris Program in Critical Theory affiliated with the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle (2018-2019), and a Global Impacts Graduate Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs (2020-2021). Her essay on financial speculation and female adultery in the work of the writer Júlia Lopes de Almeida can be found in the edited collection Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel (UCL Press, 2020).

Verónica Dávila Ellis '20

Verónica Dávila Ellis is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Latinx Studies at Smith College. She completed her Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2020. Her dissertation, “Uttering Sonic Dominicanidad: Women and Queer Performers of Musica Urbana”,  examines gender performance in the work of queer and female Dominican and Dominican-American urban music performers. 

Verónica received an M.A. in Latin American Literature from the University of Florida and a B.A. in Comparative Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her research interests include contemporary Caribbean and Latinx music, literature, and popular culture. 

Pedro Varguillas '20

Pedro has obtained his M.A. at Northwestern University in 2020 and received a B.A in Latin American Literature from Universidad de Los Andes. He is currently interested in Venezuelan 21th century Poetry. He is on the editorial committee of the journal Poesia, published by the University of Carabobo. Pedro coedit Desacuerdos, crisis y movimientos: miradas contemporáneas a las expresiones literarias y culturales latinoamericanas (Universidad Javeriana 2022). In poetry, he published Marea (LP5 2020) and was included in antogologies: Nuevo país de las letras (Banesto 2016), Nos siguen pegando bajo. Brevísima Antología Colombia-Venezuela (LP5 2020), Voces de ensueño. Antología poética del siglo XXI (Ediciones Madriguera 2021), Orquídeas Voces: muestra de poesía venezolana contemporánea (Fundación Neruda 2021).

Walther Maradiegue is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Department of Spanish at Carleton College. His dissertation, “Geographies of Indigeneity: Space, Race, and Power in the Andes, 1880-1930”,  inspects how late 19th-century and early 20th-century cultural production - from Indigenous and non-Indigenous sources- have shaped perceptions and understandings of the natural, racial and cultural landscapes of the northern Peruvian Andes. His paper asks questions about racialization, representation and territorialities, and draws on a mix of archival, literary, visual and historical texts.

Marcus Vinícius Salinas

Marcus Vinícius has obtained his M.A. degree defending the thesis, “Literatura carcelaria en los Andes: indigeneidad y nacionalismo en Perú y Bolivia” in 2020. He received his B.A. in History from University of São Paulo (USP). He is interested in exploring the work of Brazilian and Bolivian authors engaged with explaining the apparent paralysis or failure of Latin American nations at the beginning of the 20^thcentury.

Lily Frusciante '19

Lily Frusciante defended her dissertation, Beyond Memory’s Limits: Resistance, Justice, and Truth in Contemporary Brazilian, Chilean, and Argentine Culture, in 2019. For the next two years, she worked as the department’s visiting assistant professor. Before coming to Northwestern, Lily completed her undergraduate degree in Spanish at New York University and served as a middle-school intensive reading teacher in Miami, through the Teach for America program. Lily is currently a children’s book writer and a freelance copy editor, proofreader, and fact-checker for Chronicle Books.

Aarón Aguilar-Ramírez '17

Aarón Aguilar-Ramírez is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Whitman College. He completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2017. His research focuses on the representations of inter-ethnic Latina/o cultural exchange in migrant narrative and U.S. popular culture.

Marlon Aquino '18

Marlon Aquino completed his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2018. He is originally from Lima (Peru) where he received a B.A. in Latin American Literature from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. After graduation, he worked as a teacher, journalist, and editor in Peru. His main interests lie in the relationship between literature and mass media in Latin America. His dissertation project explores the impact of cinema, radio, and television on Peruvian novels from the 20th and 21st century. Marlon is also the author of the novel Las tristezas fugitivas (Magreb 2011).

Dissertation: “Reconexiones con el Consumo Masivo: Las Novelas Peruanas sobre los Medios”