Gonzalo Aguiar is a doctoral candidate in Spanish. He is currently working on his dissertation entitled Campos magnéticos de la modernidad latinoamericana: sistema geopolítico e historia intelectual en la narrativa y ensayística de Brasil, Argentina y Uruguay (1900-1930). His main interests include literary theory, history of ideas in Latin America, Brazilian literature, and film studies. He has published an article in which he proposes a genealogical reading of plays by Armando Discépolo and Roberto Cossa in the latest issue of Latin American Theatre Review (Fall 2007). He has taught Spanish 101, 201, 307, 308, 311 (Summer Institute in Madrid), 313, and he is likely to teach Spanish 336 in the next semester. Email: gaguiarm@artsci.wustl.edu

Alejandra Aguilar is an M.A. candidate in Spanish. She received her B.A. from the Universidad de la República in Montevideo, Uruguay. Since then, her work has been focused on questions of gender and the construction of the social self in some of the works of Clarice Lispector, Roberto Bolaño, and the Uruguayan-born Susana Soca. Her interests include twentieth-century Brazilian narrative and poetry, textual analysis, and the narrating self in the Latin American post-Boom novel. She intends to complete her M.A. in December 2008.

Email: maaguila@artsci.wustl.edu

Lídice Alemán was born in Cuba. She completed her master’s degree in Latin American Literature at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2007. She has published two poetry collections: Entrar descalza (Ediciones Avila, 2002) and Indecisiones del arquero (Ediciones el Abra, 2003). She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Latin American literature, and her interests include psychoanalytic, feminist and queer theory, and contemporary Caribbean poetry. For more details, go to www.lidicealeman.com

Britta Anderson is from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received her B.A. in English and Spanish from Carleton College, where she obtained honors for her thesis “Dumbo en Santiago: Los productos globales y las crisis de identidad en las novelas de Alberto Fuguet.” Her interests include transatlantic studies, literary theory, powerful women, creative solutions to violence, and the effects of global influences on local realities. She plans to focus on gender studies and twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American narrative. Email: blanders@artsci.wustl.edu

Catalina Andrango-Waker is a fifth-year graduate student specializing in Colonial Latin American Literature. Her current research focuses on the oral tradition of the Andean region through music and literature as arts of resistance in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries.
E-mail: candrang@artsci.wustl.edu

Julio Ariza was an assistant professor at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and the Universidad Siglo 21. He has been collaborating on two research projects from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba since 2001. He has published “El mundo es tu pecera. Sobre Rapado y Nadar solo” in the collective volume Poéticas en el cine argentino: 1995-2005 (Comunicarte, 2005), and “Vivir adentro. Sobre Los años 90 de Daniel Link” in the collective volume El orden de la cultura y las formas de la metáfora (UNC/Ferreyra, 2006). He also worked on the project Escritores argentinos, which was published as a bilingual book by MALBA (Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires) in 2005. In 2004, he coordinated the film festival Maldita vecindad. Tres miradas sobre Ciudad de México, patrocinated by the Consulate of México in Córdoba and the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. He won the 2003-2004 Research Award from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, and more recently the 2006 Mellon Dissertation Award. He taught in the 2008 Summer Program in Madrid. He is currently working on his dissertation project, which explores the new Argentinean narratives about love. E-mail: jjarizam@artsci.wustl.edu

César Barros A. received a magister in Latin American Studies from the Universidad de Chile, and an M.A. from Washington University. He works mainly on Southern Cone literature, cinema and visual arts of the last three decades, philosophy and cultural theory. He has published “La subjetividad turística en Mantra de Rodrigo Fresán: proyecto editorial, globalización y reciclaje” in the collective volume Espacios de Transculturación en América Latina, and more recently “Cuando el mundo se vuelve mundo: La prueba de César Aira y los caminos del acto” in the Journal Working Papers. He is starting his dissertation project on the relationships between the work of art and different ‘spaces,’ such as consumption, history and politics. E-mail: cbarrosa@wustl.edu

Vicente Bernaschinais a Ph.D. student. He received his B.A. and M.A. from the Universidad de Chile. His master’s thesis dealt with nineteenth-century Chilean literature and the construction of an aesthetically constituted subject for the nation. His current fields of interest include nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southern Cone and Andean poetry and narratives; gender and literary theory, especially from a semiotic and hermeneutic point of view.

Email: vbernasc@artsci.wustl.edu

Stacy Davis-Zeytinci is a first semester PhD student from Buchanan, Virginia. She has a BA from Hollins College in English and Spanish and in 2006 graduated from the University of Richmond with a MLA in English and Spanish with a comparative literature focus. She has eleven years teaching experience, most recently as a beginning and intermediate Spanish instructor at Virginia Commonwealth University. She plans to focus on second language acquisition and pedagodgy, 18th century literature, both Latin American and Peninsular. As well, Stacy is interested in transatlantic studies perhaps focusing on post-colonialism and the development of the modern novel in Guatemala. Email: sldavis@artsci.wustl.edu

Irene Domingo recently graduated from Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, with a B.A. in Filologia Hispanica. She would like to research nineteenth- and twentieth-century narrative, both Peninsular and Latin American. However, her interests also include twentieth-century poetry and the relations between literature and other arts.
Email: campanirenill@hotmail.com

Ángeles Donoso received a B.A in Spanish American Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and an M.A from Washington University, where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. Her main interests are twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American narrative and film, aesthetics, and film theory. She has presented papers on the work of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Argentinean Cinema. She published a paper entitled “Depurar la poesía de la poesía misma: poesía, política y muerte en Estrella distante de Roberto Bolaño” in the Journal Working Papers and she just finished another article on the poetics of Roberto Bolaño’s narrative and poetry entitled “Estética, política y el posible territorio de la ficción en la obra de Roberto Bolaño”. She is currently working on her dissertation project which studies the relationship between politics and aesthetics focusing on the ways in which narrative and film rewrite or recreate the present as a potential time.
E-mail: mddonoso@wustl.edu

Boncho Dragiyski earned his M.A. in Medieval Studies from The Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on medieval history and literature, with emphasis on Spain and the Mediterranean; particular interests include exemplary discourses, incest narratives, memory, and Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations. His interests also extend to various aspects of descriptive and applied linguistics.
E-mail: bonchecito@hotmail.com

Brandan Grayson is a Ph.D. student interested in the relationships between theater and religion across the Spanish Empire. Specifically, her dissertation studies the represented strategies of social control present in 16th and 17th century Jesuit school plays that focus on the figure of the prodigal son. She completed the Graduate Certificate in Language Instruction in 2007, and was awarded first place in the Washington University Graduate Student Symposium for her project: "The Sor Juana Blog: Using Online Resources to Develop Reading Comprehension and Cultural Literacy in the Second Language Classroom." She also was awarded the Eva Sichel Memorial Essay prize for best critical essay in Spanish in 2008, and currently serves as the Editorial Assitant to the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos.
E-mail: blgrayso@artsci.wustl.edu

Megan E. Havard received her BA in Hispanic Literature from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007 where she completed an honors thesis entitled “La erotomanía en Don Quijote”, and earned her MA in Hispanic Literature here at Washington University in December of 2008. Her academic and research interests center mainly on peninsular literature, particularly Medieval and Early Modern, as well as L2 acquisition and teaching. In addition to the PhD, she will complete the Certificate in Language Instruction. Megan has taught SPN 201, 307 and 425, and during the 2009-2010 academic year she will serve as Cindy Brantmeier’s research assistant.
Email: mehavard@artsci.wustl.edu

Natalia Monetti holds a B.A. from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina and later received her M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently in the Ph.D. program. Her primary areas of interest include visual arts, the construction of memory in documentary and fictional film and contemporary Argentine literature, focusing on the link connecting aesthetics and socio-political content.
E-mail: nxmonett@artsci.wustl.edu

Jose Montelongo authored the novel Quincalla (2005) and three books for children. He translated the essay Breve Tratado del Desencanto (2007), by Nicolas Grimaldi. Currently he is working on his thesis, "Humor in Mexican Literature of the 20th Century".
E-mail: jdgalind@artsci.wustl.edu

Sara Potter is in her third year of the Ph.D. program. She earned a B.A. in Spanish and music from Central Michigan University in 1999 and received her M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College in 2000. Her interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American literature, music, theater, and science fiction. She spent two weeks this past summer in Mexico City researching the estridentista movement of the 1920s, focusing on the use of space, resistance, and reading of the female figure in estridentista literature. E-mail: sapotter@artsci.wustl.edu

Gabriela Romero-Ghiretti obtained her M.A. in Spanish and the Graduate Certificate in Language Instruction from Washington University. She is now completing her Doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures and is working on her dissertation on women writers of the first half of the 20th century in Latin America. She investigates discourses of space and gender and the development of feminine subjectivity and the female intellectual within the context of modernity. She has been awarded the Helen Fé Jones Award for Teaching in 2005, the University-wide Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence for 2005-2006, and the Eva Sichel Memorial Prize for Best Critical Essay in Spanish in 2007. She has published articles in The Reading Matrix. E-mail: geromero@wustl.edu

Lauren Sappington graduated from Truman State University in 2005 with B.A.s in Music and Spanish. She completed her M.A. in Spanish at Saint Louis University in 2008. Her academic interests include medieval works and nineteenth-century Peninsular novel, and in her free time, she likes to travel, play piano, and study theology. Email: lsapping@artsci.wustl.edu

Paulina Soto is a Ph.D. student. She received her B.A. from the Pontificia Universidad Catóica de Chile and her M.A. from the Universidad de Chile. Her master’s thesis focused on Brazilian literature and addressed the mythic construction of the Sertanejos and the Sertão in Vidas Secas (Graciliano Ramos) and Campo Geral (João Gimarães Rosa). Currently, her fields of interest include twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American narrative; recent refashioning in post-dictatorial fictions; gender and cultural theory.
E-mail: psoto@artsci.wustl.edu

Haydee Luz Taylor is from Panama City, Panama. She received a Bachelor in Humanities and majored in English at the University of Panama (2000). Also, she worked as a translator (English-Spanish) at Canon Panama, S.A., from 1999 to 2005. In 2005, she joined the Master in Teaching program at Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri, and worked as a Graduate Assistant, teaching Elementary Spanish and Latin American Culture. She graduated in May 2007. Her teaching experience also includes the middle school level; she taught Learning Skills and Spanish at Hazelwood Southeast Middle School (2007-2008). In the Fall of 2008, she joins the Master program in Spanish at Washington University with the desire to continue a Ph. D. in either Romance Language and Comparative Literature or Hispanic Languages and Literature. Her areas of interest are the Spanish Golden Age, Generation '98 and Generation '27.
Email: hltaylor@artsci.wustl.edu

Miaowei Weng began work on a Ph.D. in Spanish and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis in Fall 2005 after completing her B.A. (2002) and M.A. (2005) in China at Peking University. Her areas of interest include imaginations and strategies between Latin America and China. E-mail: miaowei_weng@hotmail.com

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