Cécile Accilien is the Director of the Institute of Haitian Studies at the University of Kansas. She is also an associate professor of Haitian Studies in the Department of African and African-American Studies. Her primary areas of interest include Haitian film, visual arts, literature, language, and culture; Gender Studies; Film Studies. Her current manuscript is entitled Haitian Hollywood: Recreating Home in Exile.

Giselle Liza Anatol is the President of the international Association of Caribbean Women Writers & Scholars. She is also a professor in the Department of English. The organization began in the late 1980s as a forum for female creative writers from the Caribbean, and has evolved into a network of scholars who study their work plus women of Caribbean heritage who write and/or write about history, the law, music, social policy, physical and mental health, the STEM fields, and other academic and professional disciplines that can generate a rich and productive dialogue. Anatol is also a professor of Caribbean and African diasporic literature at KU. She has published numerous articles on the works of authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, Nalo Hopkinson, Derek Walcott, Langston Hughes, and Jacqueline Woodson. Her most recent monograph is titled The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (Rutgers UP, 2015).

Marta Caminero-Santangelo is the Director of the KU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Professor in the Department of English. Well regarded in her field for her research on U.S. Latinx literature, and at KU for her teaching of courses in the Literature of Social Justice, Latinx Literature, and Latinx / Latin American Literature of Trauma and Testimony, she served as Chair of the Department of English from 2009-2012.  She was awarded the Kemper Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, a university-wide distinction, in 2008; she is currently the Frances L. Stiefel Professor in the English Department. Her most recent book, Documenting the Undocumented: Narrative, Nation, and Social Justice in the Gatekeeper Era, was published in June by University Press of Florida.

Joo Ok Kim is assistant professor of American Studies and Latina/o Studies at the University of Kansas. She is associate faculty at KU’s Center for East Asian Studies, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Latinx Studies Initiative, and currently serves as CLAS Leadership for Equity Fellow (2017-18). Professor Kim earned her Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of California, San Diego, her M.A. in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and her B.A. in English at KU. From 2013-15, Professor Kim was UC President's Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching interests focus on race and the Korean War, Latina/o studies, Asian American studies, transpacific and transnational studies, and literary and cultural studies. Her book project, Warring Genealogies: Race, Kinship, and the Korean War, examines the racial legacies of the Korean War through Chicano cultural production and U.S. archives of white supremacy. Her work can be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Verge: Studies in Global Asias (forthcoming), and South: a Scholarly Journal (forthcoming). Professor Kim’s research has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the American Philosophical Society.

Aron Muci is the Education Program Specialist and Outreach Coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Kansas. Born and raised in Wichita, KS to parents of Chicano and African American heritage, he is a graduate of the University of Kansas with a M.A. degree in English Literature and Literary Theory. His thesis traced intergenerational narratives of ecological, racial, and sexual violence in the U.S.-Mexico borderland found in Chicana and Latinx literature. His research interests include, U.S. Latinx literature, 20th Century literature, ecocriticism, and critical theories of gender, race, ethnicity, and queer studies.

Nicholas 'Nico' Natchoo is a Fulbright student from Mauritius and a Ph. D. candidate in the department of Curriculum and Teaching. Before joining KU he worked as a lecturer at the Mauritius Institute of Education where he was involved in teacher education and curriculum development for Mauritian Kreol. His research interests are directed toward inclusive and mother-tongue based multilingual education in postcolonial Creole societies. His dissertation project explores the transformative effects of the inclusion of Mauritian Kreol in the K-12 curriculum in Mauritius and how these transformations potentially help to recalibrate a broader conception of curriculum theory.

 

Brian Rosenblum is Director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities, and Librarian for Digital Scholarship at the University of Kansas Libraries, where he has administrative, production and outreach responsibilities in support of a variety of digital initiatives and publishing services. Prior to joining KU Libraries’ digital initiatives program in 2005 he worked at the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University Library, University of Michigan, where he helped develop electronic journals and digital scholarly projects.

Mikaela Warner is a Master's student in the Department of English with an emphasis in Early Modern Literature. She earned her B.A. in English and Education at Gustavus Adolphus College. Last Fall, Mikaela assisted in facilitating 'Black Love: A Symposium' a seven-day interdisciplinary conference at KU. Her current research explores gender fluidity across Early Modern epic and drama. 

Antje Ziethen is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on global literature in French, the urban novel, postcolonial studies, diaspora/transnational studies, geo-centered literary theory, as well as gender studies and has led to publications on Acadian, African, Caribbean, Québécois, and Indian Ocean fiction. She received a doctorate in French studies from the University of Toronto and pursued postdoctoral research at the Universities of Kassel and Göttingen, Germany, as well as at McGill University in Montreal. Her first monograph Géo/Graphies postcoloniales. La Poétique de l’espace dans le roman mauricien et sénégalais was published in 2013 by the editors of the African Literature and Art series at Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Germany. It explores the literary production and function of space in novels from Mauritius and Senegal.