7th Chicago Graduate Conference in Hispanic, Luso-Brazilian, and Latinx Studies

Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet, and professor. Her research expands on the relationship between literature and digital technologies from different perspectives.

Her new book project, Earthy Algorithms: A Posthumanist Approach to Capital, Climate and Digital Literature (forthcoming 2024) examines further the imbrication of digital technologies in literary production, looking particularly at its engagement with concepts of environmental crisis writ large, through a posthumanist lens. It focuses on the work of digital artists from Spain and the Latin American Diaspora who reconfigure digital materiality not only in relation to its physical and signifying strategies but also regarding the Capitalocene and its exploitation of the Earth and its human and non-human inhabitants.

Marquis Bey's (they/them, or any pronoun)* work focuses on blackness and fugitivity, transness, and black feminist theory. Bey is particularly concerned with modes of subjectivity that index otherwise ways of being, utilizing blackness and transness—as fugitive, extra-ontological postures—as names for such otherwise subjectivities. These two analytics (rather than endowments of the epidermis or specific bodily morphologies) are the axes around which Bey thinks about subjectivity formation and deformation, abolition, and political work.

Gabriel Giorgi works on Latin American contemporary literatures, art and cinema, with a focus on the Southern Cone and Brazil. Biopolitics, the non-human, and queerness articulate many of his critical interventions. He has published "Sueños de exterminio. Homosexualidad y representación en la literatura argentina contemporánea" (Rosario, Beatriz Viterbo, 2004), "Formas comunes. Animalidad, biopolítica, cultura" (Buenos Aires, Eterna Cadencia, 2014; translated into Portuguese in 2016) and more recently, in collaboration with Ana Kiffer, "Las vueltas del odio. Gestos, escrituras, políticas" (Buenos Aires, Eterna Cadencia, 2020; published in Brazil in 2019) He has also co-edited with Fermin Rodriguez the anthology "Excesos de vida. Ensayos sobre biopolítica" ( Buenos Aires, Paidós, 2007) Besides NYU he has been visiting professor at universities in Argentina, Brazil and Ecuador. His articles have been published in USA, Spain and Latin America.

The research and intellectual production of Sarah Bey West, PhD (they/them; ella/elle) is focused on breaking away from traditional approaches to the study and engagement of the “Latin American” literary and cultural canon. Their work is organized around theoretical frameworks—specifically, those with roots in abolitionist, decolonial and trans feminisms—that question and challenge the always already colonial, cisheteronormative underpinnings of gender, class and race relations. They are finalizing their current book-length project, entitled Caste War Textualities, a rereading of Yucatán’s nineteenth-century textual register that emphasizes how the concept of race war mobilized the transference of colonial oppression into liberal state-building. They also have active projects on contemporary Yucatec Maya “literature” and US Spanish-language “im/migration” literature. They currently serve at the rank of Assistant Professor; are core faculty in Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies; and are affiliated faculty in Latinx and Latin American Studies at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago.

Fernanda Trías is a writer and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of the novels La Azotea, La ciudad invencible and Mugre rosa, and of the short story collection No soñarás Flores. Her work has been translated into Italian, German, English and French among others. She currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia