Once again, our vibrant HLL community gets together for the Spring Tertulia and Poetry Reading, with the participation of our undergraduate and graduate students and faculty. This literary event in Spanish reflects the vitality and engagement of our community, particularly of our undergraduate students, Teaching Assistants and  lecturers, under the coordination of our Director of the Spanish Language Program, Dr. Lilia Ruiz-Debbe.

Mark your calendars for this Wednesday, April 19th (2023) from 1 to 2.20 pm in Humanities 1003 (see poster here). More details and program soon to come!

You can download last year Tertulia program and pictures here: Spring 2022 in PDF.

Attending a large academic conference and presenting your research as a graduate student is always a great challenge. We are proud that six of our doctoral students in the Department of Hispanic Languages at Stony Brook University presented their work at the 54th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Languages Association 2023 (NeMLA), held this year on March 7-10 in Niagara Falls, New York, and hosted by the University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Here is the list of our six students that participated in following roundtables and panels:

• Jesús Jiménez Valdés was co-chair of the roundtable “Resilience and Identity: America and the Spanish Empire,” and presented a paper on “Identidad y contacto en la América dieciochesca: la mirada viajera de Ulloa y Jorge Juan”. 
• María Medín Doce presented a paper titled “Salir de Casa, Volver a Casa: Narrativas del exilio en la obra de María Luisa Elío” in a panel on “Dissenting Voices: Agency and Resilience in Iberian Exiles”
• Valentina Pucci presented her paper “La rebaba de la memoria afrodescendiente en la novela Elástico de sombra [2019], de Juan Cárdenas” in the panel on “Corporality and the Senses in Hispanophone and Lusophone Literature and Film II”. 
• Jeannette Rivera was chair of the roundtable on “Obstructions to Colonial Debts” and presented a paper on “Poéticas que obstruyen la visión tropical en el Caribe”. 
• Alexis Smith presented her paper titled “A Scholarly Model for Community-based Belonging in Tardes Americanas [Mexico, 1778],” in the  roundtable on “Resilience and Identity: America and the Spanish Empire”. 
• Beatriz Solla-Vilas presented on “Transgressing Humanity: Body Dystopias and the More-than-human in Tentacle [La mucama de Omicunlé], by Rita Indiana” in the panel titled “Trans Worldbuilding.” 

Back in Long Island, our students highlighted the fact that NeMLA opens spaces for dialogue and creates networks with students and faculty from other institutions . A student mentioned that NeMLA is a great platform for a first-time experience at a US conference because of its format (panels, roundtable discussions) and the diversity of topics and periods included. In addition, NeMLA offers a mentoring and mentee program on career opportunities and practical professional issues, such as cover letters and resumés. One of our students summarized the experience saying that “participating in NeMLA helps students to showcase their projects, engage in dialogue and establish potential contacts.”

Regarding funding, the NeMLA Graduate Student Caucus provides a number of annual travel awards to graduate students (national or international) who are accepted to present papers or chair sessions at the convention. Our Stony Brook Graduate Student Organization (GSO) also offers grants to help cover travel expenses and registration. As Teaching Assistants at Stony Brook, students can become members of the GSEU (Graduate Students Employees Union), which also offers a GSEU Professional Development Program, a fund that covers expenses for professional development activities. Another possible source of travel support is available through the Stony Brook Center for Inclusive Education.

I would like to point out that the roundtable “Obstructions to Colonial Debts” was inspired in Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico, which is a remarkable intervention on the role of debt and neoliberal coloniality, and although its focus is on Puerto Rico, its approaches and concepts could be extrapolated elsewhere. I highly recommend it! As for me, it was a delightful experience to moderate and participate in this roundtable, even more so when it was about poetics and politics of refusal against coloniality and erasure through debt, neoliberalism and necropolitics. I feel very humbled to have shared insights with the other participants who, I must emphasize, are working on fascinating and socially committed projects. In addition, the Niagara falls are incredibly beautiful!! I really enjoyed the view. (Jeannette Rivera)

The NeMLA 23 PDF program is available here. Information on next year NeMLA 24 conference hosted by Tufts University (Boston on March 7-10) can be seen here.