Alexander S. Butler is an assistant professor of elementary social studies content and methods in the School of Inclusive Teacher Education at Bowling Green State University. His courses emphasize inquiry-based learning through engaging activities with sources. He earned his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with focuses in the Learning and Developmental Sciences and Teacher Education. His research focuses on the state of elementary social studies and K-12 students and teacher candidates’ conceptions and knowledge of social studies topics or disciplines. Besides being a teacher educator, he has been a teacher, wrap-around service provider in K-12 settings, camp director, curriculum developer, instructional designer, and coach.

Rafael Capó García is the founder and director of Memoria (De)colonial, a non-profit organization that critically examines the legacies of colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean through public humanities initiatives. Dr. Capó completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Curriculum Studies, where he teaches courses on education and decolonization. His dissertation critically explores the narratives of racial democracy, mestizaje, and slavery in Puerto Rican intellectual history. Rafael was the 2023-2024 digital humanities fellow at the University of Puerto Rico’s UPR Caribe Digital program, and currently teaches public history at the UPR campus in Cayey. He previously worked as a public-school Social Studies teacher for 8 years in his hometown of Santurce and completed an M.A. in History in 2016. His research interests include Caribbean philosophy, (de)coloniality / (de)colonization, historical consciousness, school textbooks, public humanities, historical narratives, and Puerto Rican studies.

MJ Carpena Melero (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist and academic, working mainly as a scholar, actor, writer, and director. They graduated from New York University in 2020 with a Bachelor in Fine Arts, double majoring in Theatre and Latin American Studies with a minor in Media Production. Their work focuses on decolonial and decentralized narratives around Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and Latin America, engaging with themes around self-sovereignty, decolonizing identities, participatory knowledge and cultural production, and collective autonomy. They also work alongside CEPA, a decolonial and healing justice organization in Puerto Rico, in their communications team. MJ will continue her studies on Latin American Decolonial Studies and its intersections with Film, Television, Theatre, and Media at New York University as a FLAS Fellow at the Center of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. 

Savrina Chinien is a Senior Lecturer in French, Francophone Literatures and Film and the Coordinator of the French Program at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad-and-Tobago. She is an Associate Member of CLARE/CELFA Research Group at Bordeaux Montaigne University as well as a film critic (African Federation of Film Critics, Senegal). Her research focuses on Francophone Caribbean Literatures and Film – she has been widely published in both English and French. Her feature film A Mauritian Mobius (2018) which she directed and wrote the script for, gained official selection at the Switzerland International Film Festival, amongst other film festivals.

Alexandra Connelly Reyes is a young mother and Viequense activist who is passionate about Vieques. She obtained an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree with a concentration in Tourism Culture from the University of Puerto Rico, Carolina Campus. Alexandra is part of different community organizations in Vieques; among them, she serves as secretary of Vidas Viequenses Valen and is the Programmatic Manager of the Archivo Histórico de Vieques. Currently, she coordinates the digitization process of the collection of documentary filmmaker Andrés Nieves Domínguez. Additionally, she is an educator committed to disseminating and preserving the history of Vieques and sharing and teaching this rich cultural heritage.

Sharika Crawford is a historian of Latin America. Her research has focused on Colombia, circum-Caribbean migration, maritime borderlands, and the experience of Afro-Latin Americans. Dr. Crawford has published her work in venues such as Historia Critica, the New West Indian Guide, International Journal of Maritime History, and Global South. Her 2020 book The Last Turtlemen: Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Crossing in the Maritime Caribbean was published by the University of North Carolina Press and received an Honorable Mention from the 2021 Association of Caribbean Historians’ Elsa Goveia Prize Committee. More recently, she is the co-editor of a forthcoming edited volume titled Understanding and Teaching Modern Latin America with the Harvey Goldberg Series at the University of Wisconsin Press.

Marie Cruz Soto is a diasporic Viequense and a historian of Vieques. She studied at the University of Puerto Rico (B.A.) and the University of Michigan (Ph.D.). Currently, she teaches at New York University and participates in different community initiatives. From the Archivo Histórico de Vieques she works to empower the Viequense community in the narration of its history, and from the Colmena Cimarrona she works to flourish food sovereignty in the Puerto Rican archipelago.  In addition, she works with a collective to ensure housing rights and access to land for the Viequense community and its future generations.

Nathan H. Dize is Assistant Professor of French at Washington University in Saint Louis. He is working on two book projects, Handle with Care: The Legacies of Black Translators of Francophone Literature and Attending to the Dead: Haitian Literature and the Practice of Mourning. Nathan is also a translator of Haitian literature, including The Immortals and The Emperor by Makenzy Orcel, I Am Alive by Kettly Mars, Duels by Néhémy Dahomey, and Antoine of Gommiers by Lyonel Trouillot. He is also a founding member of Kwazman Vwa and the co-editor of “Global Black Writers in Translation” at Vanderbilt University Press.

Dr. Darlène Dubuisson is an Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of African American Studies. As a sociocultural anthropologist, her research engages Black feminist theory, Black intellectual history, speculative fiction, apocalyptic anthropology, and migration and transnational studies. Her work traces how Black political thought, diasporic movements, and feminist praxis intersect to shape public life, focusing on the lived experiences and imaginative horizons of Black communities across the Americas. By combining ethnography, document analysis, and critical theory, she examines how people build solidarities and articulate futures in contexts marked by displacement, inequality, and state power. Her teaching centers community-engaged scholarship and collaborative, justice-oriented methods.

Isabel Espinal is the Academic Engagement Librarian for African Studies, Afro American Studies, Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies, Native American & Indigenous Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She earned her MLIS from UC Berkeley and her PhD from UMass with a dissertation titled Kiskeyanas Valientes en Este Espacio: Dominican Women Writers and the Spaces of Contemporary American Literature. She has given presentations on racial equity in librarianship, library and information services to Latinx populations, information literacy, the climate crisis and libraries, Dominican women writers in the United States, Latinx literature, and Taíno survivance in the Caribbean diaspora, among other topics. Her publications include “El Incansable Juego -The Untiring Game: Dominican Women Writing and Translating Ourselves,” “Wanted: Latino Librarians,” and “What Do Latino Students Know Anyway about Information Literacy?” Dr. Espinal is a former president of REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking. This fall she is teaching an honors seminar at UMass titled “We are not extinct!” Taíno Culture and Survivance in the Past, Present and Future

Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo is an Assistant Professor of Literatures of the Americas in the English Department at Seton Hall University. She holds a PhD from the English Department at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she specialized in Caribbean literature. Much of her work explores representations of maroons in contemporary queer Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Dominican literature. She has published peer-reviewed articles and reviews in The Avery Review, Small Axe, 80 Grados, Confluencia, The University of the West Indies’ Social and Economic Studies, and others. She is also a principal collaborator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus and an editor for The Puerto Rico Review.

Jessica A. Hutchins is a Lecturer in the John Martinson Honors Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE) and is the founding Director of the Texaco Wiki (https://iris.siue.edu/texacowiki/). She specializes in Caribbean and African Diaspora literatures, digital humanities, interdisciplinary education, and has developed innovative curriculum and open educational resources with both federal and private funding. She received the SIUE Interdisciplinary Research and Informatics Scholarship Center Faculty Fellowship, the Ann W. and Spencer T. Olin Fellowship, and was selected for the 2024 Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

Eliecer Jiménez Almeida is a filmmaker and video artist based in Miami, FL. He received an M.S. in Journalism from Florida International University, Miami, FL (2021), and a Certificate in Film Studies from The International Film and TV School (EICTV), San Antonio de los Baños, Havana, Cuba (2012). He was also part of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film Program, Miami (2016). In 2008, Jiménez Almeida founded ikaik films, a project dedicated to the production and development of experimental films. His work Persona (Person) (2014) won the Best Short Film Award at the Latino and Iberian Film Festival (LIFFY) from Yale University (2016). It was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), NYC; and at the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, Germany (2018). Usufructo (Usufruct) was awarded with the EICTV, San Antonio de los Baños, the Special Prize of the 10th Gibara International Non-Budget Film Festival, Cuba (2012). La faz de las aguas (The Face of the Waters) was awarded the Short Film Prize, Handle Climate Change International Film Festival, China (2017). The piece En un paquete de spaguettis (In a Package of Spaguettis) was selected for the International Prize Reina Sofia, Spain (2011). Jiménez Almeida has been invited as Visiting Filmmaker to several academic institutions in the US, including Yale University, Columbia University, New York University (NYU), The City University of New York (CUNY), University of Miami (UM), and Florida International University (FIU). His work has been exhibited in the US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, China, India, Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala. All his films have been produced outside of the main Cuban cinematography industry. He is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Modern Languages at FIU, where he is writing a dissertation on the influence of Nicolás Guillén Landrian in the films of the Cuban Diaspora.

Santiago Juan-Navarro is a Professor of Hispanic Literature and Film in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University. He holds a Ph.D. in Spanish and Comparative literature from Columbia University and has extensively published and lectured on Cuban cinema. He has developed and taught undergraduate and graduate Cuban film courses and served as Graduate Director and Associate Chair in the Department of Modern Languages. He has authored several books, including Archival Reflections: Postmodern Fiction of the Americas, Nuevas aproximaciones al cine hispánico, La ciudad en la literatura y el cine, and Los estudios culturales hispánicos en el siglo XXI. He has also published over one hundred articles, book chapters, film notes, encyclopedia entries, and book/film reviews in international refereed journals. Dr. Juan-Navarro serves on the editorial board of several scholarly journals and has evaluated book manuscripts and grant proposals for various organizations and institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Institut Charles Cros-France, Centre Interuniversitaire de Recherche sur l’Education et la Culture, Swiss National Science Foundation, City University of New York, and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He has received several awards, including the Florida International University Foundation Research Award (1997), the Faculty Senate Teaching Award (2003), the Provost Humanities Research Grant (2021), and the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC) Award (2023). Dr. Juan-Navarro has conducted funded research in Havana and Buenos Aires, was selected to the Fulbright Senior Specialist Roster, and is an elected member of the Academy of Cuban History in Exile.

Marisol LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on race, social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). She is also the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). She is currently working on a book that explores the centrality of policing to the emergence and consolidation of Latinx identity in the United States.

Dr. Timothy Lomeli (Ph.D., Florida State University) is currently an Assistant Professor of French at Grinnell College, where he works on Francophone Caribbean studies, Afro-Caribbean religions, gender and sexuality, media studies, and translation. He is interested in how cultural and textual representations intersect with practices of resistance and liberation. He has published on Haitian immigration, Dany Laferrière, Michaël Ferrier, Mimi Barthélémy, the singer Chris/Redcar, and the filmmaker Paulin Vieyra. He is also the co-translator of Gisèle Pineau’s Ady, Black Sun (Liverpool University Press, 2025). He is currently working on a monograph that explores the relationship between Vodou Poetics, concepts of being, and writing the Haitian novel.

Jeanmary Lugo González posee un bachillerato en Literatura Comparada (2014) y una Maestría en Ciencias y Tecnologías de la Información (2016). Se desempeña como Bibliotecaria en la Colección Puertorriqueña de la Universided de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Ha trabajado como Coordinadora del Repositorio Institucional (2020-2022) y es parte del Comité Editorial de Acceso. Revista Puertorriqueña de Bibliotecología y Documentación (2020 al presente). Entre sus temas de interés se encuentran las colecciones especiales y las destrezas de información dirigiendo sus investigaciones a las mismas, además de literatura infantil puertorriqueña y humanidades digitales. Participó en proyectos colaborativos como Puerto Rico: una sola voz (2019-2021) y el Archivo Juan Mari Brás (2022-2023).

Rocío Luque Colautti es profesora de Lengua y Traducción Española en la Universidad de Trieste (Italia) y profesora del programa de Doctorado en Filología de la EIDUNED (España). Sus ámbitos de investigación son la lexicografía, la lingüística contrastiva español-italiano, la traducción entre estas dos lenguas y la estilística de los autores traducidos. Sobre Julia de Burgos ha publicado diferentes artículos, como “Ella misma fue su ruta: Julia de Burgos y su multiforme exilio” (Les Ateliers du SAL, 5, 2014), y dos volúmenes, entre ellos, junto con Carmen Rivera Villegas, Pellegrina in me stessa. Antologia poetica di Julia de Burgos (Arcoiris, 2014).

Dr. Natália Marques da Silva is a Museologist and Cultural Anthropologist who was born in São Paulo, Brazil and currently lives in Central Florida. Natália has an Art – Art History B.A. (2010) from UCF, a Museology M.A. (2012) from UF, and a PhD (2022) in Global & Sociocultural Studies from Florida International University. Her research focuses on enslavement memorialization, homecoming travel, and vestiges of colonialism in West Africa (Guiné Bissau, Cape Verde) and across the Americas (Brazil, Haiti, U.S.).

Sofía Martínez Rivera (she/her) is the coordinator of the project (Des)vío and the lead workshop facilitator at Memoria Decolonial since 2022. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Art History and Global Liberal Studies at New York University (2022). Her thesis, What We Do With What We See: Decolonizing the POC Body, demystifies the representation of Black bodies in the arts by examining the “white, male, colonial gaze” in them. In addition to her humanist, pedagogical, and research-related work, she is a poet and writer. Her creative work can be found in Acentos Review.

Lynette Mills (née Sampson) is an educator and independent researcher. She was formerly an Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities at The University of the West Indies (2016 – 2023). Her background includes 15 years of media practice and teaching in undergraduate media and communication studies. She holds B.A. in Media and Communication from The UWI, Postgraduate Diploma in Educational Studies from Sheffield University, UK and MPhil History from University of the West Indies. Her research interests include Pan Africanism, Black media history (Black press in particular), African and African diaspora studies and documentary film as a vehicle for public history, teaching and learning.

​​Sarah Molinari is a cultural anthropologist, educator, and public scholar who works at the intersection of ethnography, critical disaster studies, feminist geography, and digital humanities. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the CUNY Graduate Center and works as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Sarah has taught interdisciplinary courses at the University of Puerto Rico, Cayey and Hunter College, CUNY and is a Co-Founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus. Sarah’s publications appear in both scholarly and popular outlets such as Urban Geography, Climate and Development, CENTRO Journal, Aftershocks of Disaster (Haymarket Books), Truthout, and Anthropology News.

Annabelle Mullen-Pacheco es cineasta, abogada y directora creativa del cortometraje-documental “Desempacando: Género, migración y violencia”. Cursó estudios en la Universidad de Georgetown, Derecho en la Universidad de Puerto Rico y una maestría en Administración de Empresas (MBA) en la Universidad de Miami. Finalizó el MPXA, programa de maestría en Producción Ejecutiva por la Universidad de A Coruña, la Fundación Amancio Ortega y la Fundación Santiago Rey Fernández-Latorre. Su compañía de producción Belle Films incluye proyectos como “Cuentas Pendientes” y “The Last Colony”, así como largometrajes de ficción como “Érase una vez en el Caribe” y “Arroba Amor,” entre otros.  

Carmen M. Rivera Villegas es profesora de Estudios Hispánicos del Recinto Universitario de Mayagüez de la Universidad de Puerto Rico. Se especializa en literatura puertorriqueña. Ha publicado artículos sobre literatura puertorriqueña, mexicana y española en libros y revistas académicas de Puerto Rico, Estados Unidos y Europa. Es co-editora de los libros Las vanguardias en Puerto Rico (Ediciones de La Discreta, 2009), Hablan sobre Julia (Casa Paoli, 2015) y Verdor que salta: medioambiente, lengua y literatura (Ediciones del Flamboyán, 2022). En sus clases explora nuevas metodologías para la didáctica del español como lengua materna y la literacidad académica en el contexto universitario.

Medardo Gabriel Rosario is an assistant professor in the Department of Modern Languages at Florida International University. He obtained a Bachelor of Science with a concentration in Chemistry from the University of Puerto Rico (2005) and a Master of Arts with a concentration in Chemistry from Brown University (2006). Subsequently, he earned a Master of Arts with a concentration in Hispanic Studies also from the University of Puerto Rico (2014) and a doctorate in Hispanic and Portuguese-Brazilian Studies from the University of Chicago (2020). His academic research revolves around two themes: the influence of Spanish Golden Age literature in Latin America and representations of the Caribbean in cartography and literature developed in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.

Leah Rosenberg teaches Caribbean and Postcolonial studies and currently serves as graduate coordinator for the English department at the University of Florida. Her book, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (Palgrave 2007) tells the story of how intellectuals in the English-speaking Caribbean first created a distinctly Caribbean and national literature in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With J. Dillon Brown, she co-edited Beyond Windrush: Rethinking Postwar West Indian Literature (U Mississippi Press, 2015), an essay collection that significantly expands our understanding of West Indian literature of the 1950s by examining a broad spectrum of overlooked writers, genres, and topics. “Refashioning Caribbean Literary Pedagogy in the Digital Age,” (Caribbean Quarterly 62:3-4 (2017), pp. 422-444) describes her work in digital humanities and pedagogy. She serves as co-chair of the advisory board of the Digital Library of the Caribbean (www.dloc.com), an open-access, international partnership dedicated to preserving and making accessible Caribbean library and archival materials. She is currently at work on a book about the linked history of tourism and literature in the Caribbean.

Laëtitia Saint-Loubert obtained a PhD in Caribbean Studies from the University of Warwick. She is a practising literary translator, currently working at Nantes Université, where she teaches translation and Translation Studies. Prior to joining Nantes Université, she completed a two-year Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Dublin, where she worked on a project entitled “Rethinking Translation Studies from Caribbean Meridians: Towards an Ecosystemic Approach”. Her first monograph, The Caribbean in Translation: Remapping Thresholds of Dislocation (Oxford, Peter Lang) was published in 2020, following receipt of the 2018 Peter Lang Young Scholars Award in Comparative Literature. She has translated works by Caribbean writers Michelle Cliff, Elizabeth Nunez, Gisèle Pineau and Roger Parsemain, and is currently working on a collaborative English translation of a Reunionese novel.

​​Elithet Silva-Martínez, PhD es Catedrática en la Escuela Graduada de Trabajo Social Beatriz Lassalle de la Universidad de Puerto Rico en el Recinto de Río Piedras. Ha documentado la experiencia de sobrevivientes de violencia de género, publicando estudios en revistas y libros, así como el cortometraje-documental “Desempacando: Género, migración y violencia”. Junto al Centro de la Mujer Dominicana publicó el libro “Narrativas de Lucha: Mujeres inmigrantes y violencia de género en Puerto Rico”. También es co-fundadora de la organización SIEMPRE VIVAS Metro, la cual centra en la atención, prevención e investigación sobre la violencia de género en Puerto Rico. Contacto: elithet.silva@upr.edu.

Dr. Petrouchka Moïse is Assistant Professor / Cultural & Community-based Digital Curator at Grinnell College Libraries who teaches classes on visual and material culture and curatorial studies, focusing on the Caribbean. In her role as Cultural and Community-Based Digital Curator, Dr. Moïse is responsible for developing interdisciplinary initiatives to enhance the learning experience of the academic and cultural community. Dr. Petrouchka Moïse is also a 2020-24 CLIR/Mellon post-doctoral fellow working with Dr. Fredo Rivera as co-leads of the Haitian Arts Digital Crossroad (HADC) project. Dr. Moïse focuses on the use of digital technology in the areas of archiving and public memory.

Kessie Theliar-Charles is a research-based artist affiliated with CIDIHCA (International Center for Haitian, Caribbean, and Afro-Canadian Documentation and Information). Her practice takes shape through research-creation, merging oral history and archival research to preserve and make accessible the diverse narratives of the Haitian diaspora. Her current research is dedicated to documenting Haitian visual artists who left Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship from 1957 to 1986 and reestablished themselves in Montreal, New York, and Paris. More broadly, she focuses on the recovery, preservation, and dissemination of the heritage of Black visual artists who have been and continue to be active in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal.

Emilio Travieso teaches at the Centre Éducatif St Ignace de Loyola, in Wanament, Haiti. He is affiliated with the Groupe de Recherche en Sciences Sociales at the Faculté de Sciences Économiques, Sociales et Politiques (Université Notre Dame d’Haiti) in Port-au-Prince. He is a Jesuit priest. His research publications include: “Yon ipotèz sou kèk mo kreyòl ki gen orijin yo nan lang espanyòl” (Rechèch Etid Kreyòl, 2023), “Ecological Implications of the Sacred in Azor’s ‘Palmis Kanpe’” (Journal of Haitian Studies, 2023), and “Modelos alternativos de desarrollo” (Revista Iberoamericana de Economía Social y Solidaria, 2022). He holds a doctorate in International Development (University of Oxford). (English)

Emilio Travieso travay kòm pwofesè nan Centre Éducatif St Ignace de Loyola, Wanament, Ayiti. Li se manm yon gwoup rechèch (Groupe de Recherche en Sciences Sociales) nan Fakilte Syans Ekonomik, Sosyal ak Politik, nan Université Notre Dame d’Haïti, Pòtoprens. Li se yon pè jezuit. Pami piblikasyon syantifik li yo, nou ka site : « Yon ipotèz sou kèk mo kreyòl ki gen orijin yo nan lang espanyòl » (Rechèch Etid Kreyòl, 2023), « Ecological Implications of the Sacred in Azor’s ‘Palmis Kanpe’ » (Journal of Haitian Studies, 2023), ak « Modelos alternativos de desarrollo » (Revista Iberoamericana de Economía Social y Solidaria, 2022). Li gen yon doktora nan Devlopman Entènasyonal (inivèsite Oxford). (Kreyòl)

Dr. Laura Wagner is a cultural anthropologist, writer of nonfiction and fiction, archivist, curator, and translator. She was the project archivist for the Radio Haiti Archive at Duke University’s Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. She holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from UNC Chapel Hill, where her research focused on displacement, humanitarian aid, and everyday life in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. She is currently writing a book that weaves together the story of Radio Haiti and its archive with her ethnographic research and personal experience of the earthquake.

Dinah M. Wilson Fraites works as a cataloging librarian in the Library System of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She has a M.A. in Comparative Literature (2011), a M.I.S. in Library and Information Science (2018) and is currently a doctoral student in the Hispanic Studies Department at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. Her areas of interest include authority work and identity management, metadata for special collections, linked open data, digital humanities, digital community archives, and the history of libraries and archives in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.