Professor Ivonne Del Valle

Associate Professor of Colonial Studies.

She received her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 2004, and before returning to the Bay Area in 2009, she taught at the University of Michigan. Her research and teaching make connections between the past and the present which try to show the relevance of the colonial period for an understanding of contemporary times. She was co-director of the Berkeley research group “Mexico and the Rule of Law.” She has written a book and a series of articles on the Jesuits (José de Acosta and Loyola, and Jesuits in the northern borderlands of New Spain) as a particularly influential politico-religious order that served modernization and the expansion of the Spanish empire.

She is currently working on the drainage of the lakes of Mexico City and the role of the colonization of Spanish America from the 15th century onward in the development of new epistemologies and political theories. In the latter, she is exploring how both the unprecedented violence of conquest and colonization and the need for the effective administration of the colonies brought about important theoretical, technological, and epistemological changes which may have been conceived to be put in place in the colonies, but which in the long run transformed the way Europe understood and fashioned itself.

Source: https://spanish-portuguese.berkeley.edu/people/ivonne-del-valle/

Professor Pablo García Loaeza

Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies and Professor of Spanish, West Virginia University

Pablo García Loaeza earned his B.A. in Latin American Literature form the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City and graduate degrees in Spanish from the University of Rhode Island (M.A.) and Indiana University Bloomington (Ph.D.). He started teaching literature in 1998 and Spanish as a second language in 1999.

Dr. García Loaeza main area of expertise is early modern Spanish-American literature and culture. His research on the subject has appeared in several edited volumes and in such journals as Colonial Latin American Review, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, and Hispania. He is a co-author of The Improbable Conquest (Penn State Press, 2015) and The Native Conquistador (Penn State Press, 2015). He regularly teaches advanced Spanish reading and conversation courses, as well as literature and culture courses, from general surveys to more specialized seminars. He also teaches graduate courses in colonial Spanish American literature, Mexican literature, and Spanish American poetry.

Source: https://worldlanguages.wvu.edu/faculty-staff/administration/pablo-garcia-loaeza

Elena Gallego

Elena Gallego is a well-known antiquarian book dealer with a bookstore in Madrid (Spain) and an office in San Antonio, TX (USA), specializing in books in the Spanish language. Before opening her business, Elena Gallego Rare Books, she had worked for ten years as the Director of the Department of Books and Manuscripts of Durán Auctionhouse in Madrid (Durán Subastas de Arte). For the past fifteen years, she has been supplying rare Latin American imprints to libraries and individuals across the globe. She graduated from the Complutense University of Madrid with a Master's in Library Science and Documentation.

She has taught courses about appraisal and valuation at various institutions, including the Complutense University, University of Zaragoza, SEDIC, Reina Sofía Museum. She has served as the Director of the valuation, appraisal, and cataloging of the Special collections project at the Library of the Bank of Spain, Valuations for the Cervantes Institute, Museum of Modern Art of Canada, and private collections.