Isolina Ballesteros is an Assistant Professor of Modern Languages at Baruch College-CUNY. Her field of specialty is contemporary Spanish cultural studies. Professor Ballesteros has published extensively on Spanish and Latin American women writers, the image of women in the post-Franco literature, and Spanish and European film. She is the author of two books: Escritura femenina y discurso autobiográfico en la nueva novela española, (Letras Femeninas, 1994), and Cine (Ins)urgente: textos fílmicos y contextos culturales de la España postfranquista (Fundamentos, 2001). Her current book project is titled, ‘Undesirable’ Otherness and ‘Immigration Film’ in the European Union.

Charles Beatty Medina is an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at the University of Toledo. His research focuses on the African Diaspora in Latin America with a concentration on maroon societies and African resistance to colonial rule. Among Professor Beatty Medina’s publications is “Caught between Rivals: The Spanish-African Maroon Competition for Captive Indian Labor in the Region of Esmeraldas during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries” which appeared in the July 2006 issue of The Americas. He is currently at work on a book-length manuscript titled, Rebels and Conquerors: African Slaves, Spanish Authority, and the Domination of Esmeraldas, 1563-1621, which examines the attempt by African slaves to establish an autonomous state on the coast of Ecuador in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Silvia Bermúdez is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her areas of research and teaching are Contemporary Peninsular Literatures, Transatlantic Studies, Latin America (especially Peru) and Spain’s stateless nations (especially Galicia). Along with her many essays, Professor Bermúdez has published two books Las dinámicas del deseo: subjetividad y lenguaje en la poesía española contemporánea (Libertarias, 1997)and La esfinge de la escritura: la poesía ética de Blanca Varela (Juan de la Cuesta, 2005). She also co-edited with Timothy McGovern and Antonio Cortijo a collected volume of essays tititled Stateless Nations to Postnational Spain/De naciones sin estado a la España Postnacional (Society of Spanish and Spanish-American Studies, 2002). Her current work pays particular attention to how Spain’s new geopolitical position places this multilingual nation-state at the crossroads of the complex geographies and imagined communities that result from the circulation of peoples and cultures from Latin America and Africa. Rocking the Boat: The Rhythms of Immigration in Spanish Pop Music, 1984-2004, is Professor Bermudez's current book project. It addresses songs, pop groups and songwriters that have turned their attention to the materiality of immigration, arguing that a) it is in Spanish music where immigration is first given testimony, and other cultural productions such as literature or film will engage this reality later on; and b) the songs bear witness to the specific effects that border crossing and transnational movements have on immigrants reaching the Spanish shores.

Jonathan Gayles is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Georgia State University. His primary research area is the cultural context of educational outcomes. A recent area of interest is educational policy analysis and cultural studies. While working as a program officer at the Florida Education Fund in Tampa, Professor Gayles directed a statewide achievement program for African American students as part of the Florida Education Fund’s efforts to increase the representation of African Americans in the professoriate. He has published a number of articles in scholarly journals including Educational Policy, International Journal of Educational Reform, Multicultural Education, The Journal of African American Studies and Anthropology, and Education Quarterly. He is an original member of KMT Asen, a brotherhood based on African rites of passage into manhood. As such, he co-founded the Akenti rites of passage program in 1991 and created the Sankofa History Challenge to engage young people beyond the limiting context of the classroom.

Susan Martin-Márquez is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portugues and the director of the Cinema Studies Program at Rutgers Universsity. Professor Martin-Márquez's research and teaching center on Modern Spanish Peninsular cultural studies and Spanish-language film; she also offers courses on world cinema. Her publications include Feminist Discourse and Spanish Cinema: Sight Unseen (Oxford,1999) and the collaborative project, cinema and the mediation of everyday life: an oral history of cinema-going in 1940s and 1950s spain (Berghahn Books, forthcoming). Her most recent book, Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (Yale, 2008), scrutinizes the anxious reformulations of national identity resulting from Spaniards' post-Enlightenment rediscovery of their medieval Andalusi past, precisely at a time in which "scientific racism" rose to dominance. The study details how the conjunction of these two phenomena with spain's compensatory neo-colonial project in africa, as well as with the rise of peripheral nationalisms, produced a complexly-layered negotiation of identities that continues up until the present day.

Mariselle Meléndez is an Associate Professor of Colonial Spanish American Literatures and Cultures at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She researches and teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Colonial Spanish American literatures and cultures with a special emphasis on the eighteenth century, gender, race, and cultural studies, colonial and postcolonial theory, and nineteenth-century female essayists. Professor Meléndez is the author of Raza, género e hibridez en El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (U of North Carolina Press, 1999) and co-editor, with Santa Arias, of Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture and Experience (Bucknell, 2002). Her many essays have appeared in American Antiquarian Society, Colonial Latin American Review, Revista Iberoamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispá nicos, Revista Chilena de Literatura, Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, DIECIOCHO (Hispanic Enlightenment), among other journals and various books of collected essays. Her current book project is tentatively titled Monsters, Martyrs and Dangerous Women: The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth Century Peru. It examines the articulation of female identities through the use of language, bodily images, and corporeal metaphors in eighteenth-century Peruvian newspapers, legal documents, illustrated chronicles and religious texts and focuses on the different ways in which the female body is conceived by male authorities and female subjects and the relationship of such conceptions with issues of sexual difference, gender identity, discipline, power and domination.

Rachel O'Toole is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Her graduate and undergraduate courses examine the experiences of indigenous people within Spanish colonial rule, how enslaved and free people of African descent negotiated early modern Atlantic world slavery and the intersections between colonial indigenous, and African Diaspora histories. Professor O'Toole's current work centers the early Atlantic world in the southern Iberian empires where free and enslaved ‘Africans’ and ‘Indian’ laborers created new, colonial identities from elite, labor categories. During the ‘long’ 17th century, on the northern Peruvian coast, Spanish authorities and local landholders labeled a diverse African population as ‘black’ to signify an enslaved status and created ‘Indians’ from diverse indigenous communities in order to extract tribute and labor. She has published essays in such journals as the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History and The Americas; her essay "Castas y representación en Trujillo colonial" appeared inMás allá de la dominación y la resistencia: Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI- XX (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2005). She is co-editor, with Sherwin Bryant and Ben Vinson III, of a forth-coming collection of essays titled Africans to Colonial Spanish America, (U of Illinois P, 2008).

Juan Manuel Santana Pérez is a Profesor Modern History Universidad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Profesor Santana Pérez has held visiting professorships throughout Europe and the Americas. He has published extensively on various aspects of the Canary Islands history, the philosophy of history, and the Enlightenment period, history and film. Recently he has begun to publish on the Carribean basin and history and film. Among Profesor Santana Pérez' many books are Pólitica educativa de Carlos III en Canarias (Universidad de La Laguna, 1990), Emigración por reclutamientos militares: Canarios en Luisiana (Universidad de Las Palmas de G.C., 1992), La puerta afortunada: Canarias en las relaciones Hispano-Africanas de los siglos XVII y XVIII (La Catarata, 2002), Excluidos y recluidos en el antiguo régimen: Hospitales en Gran Canaria (Anroart, 2005), Paradigmas historográficos contemporáneos (Fundación Buría, 2005), and Representaciones de la historia moderna en el cine (Anroart, 2008)

Michael Ugarte is a Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri. He specializes in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Spanish Literature. Professor Ugarte has published extensively in modern peninsular Spanish literature and recently has become interested in cultural studies and postcolonial literature. His major publications include: Madrid 1900: the Capital as Cradle of Culture (Penn State, 1996), España y su Civilización (with Kathleen McNerney, McGraw-Hill 1992), Shifting Ground: Spanish Civil War Exile Literature (Duke, 1989), and Trilogy of Treason: an Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo (U of Missouri P, 1982). Professor Ugarte is the editor with Prof. Mbaré Ngom of a collection of essays on the culture of Equatorial Guinea published in Equatorial Guinea and Spanish Letters (2004), a special issue of the Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies.