Derek Lee: “Robert Langdon Exposed!! The Shocking Truth behind Dan Brown's Conspiracy Fiction”
As an interdisciplinary scholar, I teach and do research across a broad swath of twentieth and twenty-first century literature, including Asian American literature, ethnic speculative fiction, science studies, and the graphic novel. My first book—Parascientific Revolutions: The Science and Culture of the Paranormal (U. Minnesota Press, 2025)—explores psi phenomena across modern science, speculative fiction, and ethnic literature. I am currently working on two book projects. The first is a study of Asian American heroes and villains in comic books. The second is an exploration of conspiracy theories in contemporary literature. I teach classes in Asian American literature, science fiction, fantasy, the supernatural, literature and science, and comics.
Ana R. Alonso-Minutti: "Becoming Lloronas: Walking and Wailing toward Healing"
Ana Alonso Minutti (she/hers/ella) is Professor of Music, Research Associate at the Southwest Hispanic Research Institute, and Faculty Affiliate of the Latin American and Iberian Institute, the Feminist Research Institute, and the Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of New Mexico. She currently serves as Associate Chair for Academic Faculty in the Department of Music and as Musicology Area Head. Her research lies at the intersection of musicology, ethnomusicology, feminist and queer theory, and decolonial studies. Working within this nexus, she examines experimental and avant-garde practices in Mexico and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, situating sound within hemispheric and transnational contexts. By foregrounding Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and Latinx musicians and communities, her scholarship reorients Euro-American historical narratives and expands the scope and frameworks of global music studies.
Maria del Pilar Blanco: “Spiritual Planets: Nation-Building and Other Worlds in Nineteenth-Century Mexico”
My current project examines the representation of children's health in a range of archival materials from Cuba and Puerto Rico after the US's entry into the Caribbean in 1898. I have published several articles on Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, most recently 'Picturing "Our Colonial Problem": Puerto Rico and Jack Delano's Photographic Humanism' (Intersections 27; 2025). I have written articles and chapters on Mexican fin-de-siècle Spanish American periodicals, popular science, Spanish American modernismo, Decadence, global modernisms, spectrality, and proto-Latinx writers like William Carlos Williams and Julia de Burgos. My previous work, which studies narratives of haunting as responses to different processes of modernization in the Americas and beyond, includes a monograph (Ghost-Watching American Modernity, 2012) and two volumes co-edited with Esther Peeren (The Spectralities Reader from 2013 and Popular Ghosts, 2010).
Madalina Meirosu: “Emotional Atmospheres for Sale: The Making of Transylvanian Dread from Dracula to the ‘World's Most Haunted Forest’”
Dr. Mădălina Meiroșu is an interdisciplinary scholar of Comparative Literature and Romanian Studies whose work moves across literature, cultural history, the medical humanities, and the environmental humanities. Her research explores how Central and Eastern European cultures imagine technology, emotion, and ecological change, with particular attention to borderland histories and the lived textures of everyday life. She writes about AI in European literature and about the cultural politics of rivers, memory, and environmental loss. Her current book project examines how nineteenth and early twentieth century writers imagined artificial intelligence long before its technological reality. The project connects emotional geographies, environmental thought, and early science fiction to build a new narrative about human and nonhuman agency in modern Europe. She also publishes on suffering bodies, disability, ecocriticism, post-socialist memory, and the cultural afterlives of industrialization.