Panelists and Abstracts

Brenda Odría Loayza is a PhD candidate in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures at the University of Toronto.

 Her research focuses on contemporary Latin American Literature and Visual Culture, specifically Peruvian literature, film, and art depicting how queer bodies interact with water. Areas of interest include the Environmental Humanities, Queer Theory, Affect Theory and Spatial Theory.

Lynda Musilwa is a 5th-year Ph.D. student at Princeton University's Department of French and Italian.

She earned a BA in Lettres Modernes and an MA in Langues et Lettres Régionales et Etrangères from Université Paris-Est Créteil - Paris XII. She holds an MA in French Literature from Boston College and another from Princeton University.

Her dissertation centres on postcolonial and futurist landscapes in French sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean.

Yuxuan Miao is a PhD student in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her undergraduate and master’s degrees in Spanish philology in China. 

Her academic interests focus on contemporary Latin American literature, with an emphasis on female writers and ecological concerns. Yuxuan Miao works with the aim of bridging the multicultural world in which she lives and strives to deepen the mutual understanding of women of color.

Amaka Megbulem is a first-year French literature doctoral student at Purdue University.

She obtained her master's and bachelor's degrees in French language, literature, and francophone studies with minors in scientific translation and German from the Universities of Lagos and Benin, respectively.

Her current research focus is on how French female writers of the 19th century used traditional and non-traditional sensory perception to depict reality in their work.

Braden Ross (MA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a PhD student in German at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Her most recent publication in Die Unterrichtspraxis, "Effective warm-ups in the German-language classroom: Form and function,” details the J.A.R.R. model warm-up and how its implementation can lead not only to better language outcomes, but also a sense of classroom community. 

Her current research interests include foreign language pedagogy and the literature of the Weimar Republic, with focus on Gebrauchslyrik of the mid-1920s.

Juan Romero Vinueza is a PhD Student in the Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is an Ecuadorian writer, editor, translator, researcher, Spanish tutor, and he is the author of six poetry collections, which have earned national and international recognition. 

As a scholar, his research has focused on twentieth century Latin American and Spanish poetry, humor and irony, pop culture, migration, violence, urban and landscape studies, the poetics of space, corporeal poetics, and translation; his tangential interests include Andean and tropical gothic fiction, Latin American sci-fi, avant-garde poetics and movements, and noir.

Iván Díez De la Pava holds a BA in Modern Languages from the University of Deusto and an MA in Spanish Literatures and Cultures from the University of Florida. He is a PhD student at Georgetown University and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of Deusto. 

His research in Environmental Humanities explores human-nonhuman relationships, materiality, and landscapes in contemporary Latin American literature and film.

Magnus Ask Jensen is a 2nd-year MA student in the German Department at the University of Maryland. He received his BA in German with a minor in Social Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. 

His research interests include gender and sexuality in German literature, the learning experience of non-native German speakers, and literary and cultural products of the Weimar Republic. His master's thesis focuses on queering temporalities by looking at the imagined (queer) futures in Weimar Era illustrated magazines and contemporary literature.

Yihan Lulu Wang is a Ph.D candidate in Chinese and Comparative Literature at Washington University in Saint Louis, and she is currently in Baltimore as a visiting student at Johns Hopkins University. 

Yihan's dissertation studies imaginations of care in contemporary Chinese science fiction. Her broader research interests include Chinese modern and contemporary literature, narrative theory, and cultural discourses of emotion.

Maggie Dunlap is a Ph.D. student of Literature and Cultural Studies in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Georgetown University. She received a B.A. in Political Science from Sewanee: The University of the South and an M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College. 

Her academic interests include affect theory, contemporary Latin American fiction and nonfiction, and the role of narrative in articulating lived experiences of violence. Her dissertation proposal, “The Discourse of Disaster: Nonfiction Literatures of Catastrophe in Contemporary Latin America,” is a comparison of Argentine and Brazilian narrative nonfiction portraying urban crises like nightclub fires and nuclear contamination events.

Apolline Lagarde is a doctoral candidate in French Modern Studies at the University of Maryland. 

Her engagement with questions of social justice began during her first master’s degree at the University of Caen (Normandy, France), where she completed a thesis on the Black Lives Matter movement and racial inequality in the United States. 

Her current research investigates the ways in which contemporary French and Francophone literature addresses the intersection of social justice and climate change. She is particularly interested in how literary texts from Africa and the Caribbean bear witness to the enduring environmental traumas of colonization, especially through the representation of alternative cosmologies.

In parallel with her academic work, she is pursuing a certificate in Digital Humanities and contributes to La Revue des Colonies, a digital bilingual edition of the nineteenth-century abolitionist journal founded by the Martinican politician Cyrille Bissette, under the direction of Professor Maria B. Solomon