Keynote Speakers

Dr. Silvina Montrul

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

I was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina and completed my undergraduate university education in Argentina. I received a Master’s in English from the University of Cincinnati and a PhD in Linguistics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. I have been a professor in SUNY-Albany and I came to the University of Illinois in 1999.

I am a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and in the Department of Linguistics and I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in Spanish and in English. I was Head of the Department of Spanish, Italian & Portuguese from 2010-2013 and Head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese from 2015-2016. In 2010 I founded the University Language Academy for Children, and after school and summer camp Spanish program for 4–16-year-old children, which I directed until 2018.

Research Interests

Second language acquisition
bilingualism
heritage language acquisition

Dr. Luciana Namorato

Indiana University

Luciana Namorato is an Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, where she also serves as the Resident Director of the Madrid Program for the 2023–24 academic year. She holds adjunct faculty status in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Dr. Namorato earned her Ph.D. and M.A. in Luso-Brazilian Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and holds dual B.A. degrees in Letters from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and in Journalism from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio).

Dr. Namorato’s research focuses on Brazilian and Portuguese literatures and cultures, transatlantic studies, contemporary Latin American narrative, and gender studies. Her work is affiliated with African Studies, Critical Race and Postcolonial Studies, the Institute for European Studies, and the Latino Studies Program. She has published extensively, including co-editing volumes such as Luso-Brazilian Literature in/and the Global Context: Crossing Borders and Transatlantic Dialogues: Realism and Modernity in Eça de Queirós and Machado de Assis, as well as authoring Diálogos borgianos: Intertextualidade e imaginário nacional na obra de Jorge Luis Borges e de Antonio Fernando Borges. Her academic contributions also include numerous articles and book chapters on themes ranging from political engagement in Machado de Assis’s works to explorations of madness and violence in contemporary Latin American literature.

Dr. Ana Forcinito

University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Ana Forcinito earned her BA from the University of Buenos Aires and her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. She specializes in modern and contemporary Latin American literature, cultural studies, and feminist theory. Her research spans testimonio, cultural theory, photography, film, and gender studies, with a focus on human rights, memory, and justice in post-authoritarian regimes, feminist and decolonial perspectives from the Global South, and Latin American audiovisual studies, particularly women filmmakers in Argentina.

She teaches courses on Latin American literature, cinema, visual studies, memory, human rights, and gender studies. In 2022, she received the University of Minnesota Motley Award for Exemplary Teaching.

Professor Forcinito’s books include Memorias y nomadías (2004), Los umbrales del testimonio (2012), Óyeme con los ojos (2018, Casa de las Américas Award), and Intermittences (2019). She has edited ten essay collections on interdisciplinary topics and co-edited works on human rights, gender, and memory. She held the Arsham and Charlotte Ohanessian Chair (2013–2022) and received grants from institutions like the American Philosophical Society and the Rockefeller Humanities Programs.

Her current projects include a feminist analysis of gender violence and transitional justice in Argentina, focusing on sexual violence during dictatorship and femicide activism, and a study of Latin American and Latinx narratives of the body through posthuman feminist and decolonial lenses, exploring memory, corporeality, and transformation.