We are very happy to announce that the conference will feature keynote presentations by Professors Masha Salazkina, Amalia Córdova and Bryce Henson, as well as film presentations by directors Cecilia Aldarondo and Juan Carlos Rodríguez. Additional keynote speakers will be announced soon, and more information about the December 4–6, 2025 conference will follow. 

Masha Salazkina 

Masha Salazkina is Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of In Excess: Sergei Eisenstein’s Mexico (U of Chicago Press, 2009), World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities and Solidarities in the Global Cold War (U of California Press, 2023) and Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (U of California Press, 2024), and co-editor of Sound Speech Music in Russian and Soviet Cinema (U of Indiana Press, 2015), Global Approaches to Amateur Film Histories and Cultures (U of Indiana Press, 2021) and Teaching Migration in Literature, Film, and Media (MLA, 2025). She is currently co-editing two volumes on histories and practices of global solidarity and a special issue of Feminist Media Histories on Developmentalism, Media, and Gender (all forthcoming in 2026), as well as completing a book on the global reception of the Euro-disco stars Boney M.

Keynote Lecture. Transnational Genealogies of Latin American Melodramatic Media (Thursday Morning)

Recent scholarship has highlighted the growing global influence of popular culture from the Global South, which increasingly challenges the dominance of Hollywood and other Northern media industries. While critics such as Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar theorize this phenomenon as a “global-popular” modality—undeniable in reach yet ambiguous in politics—its deeper genealogies remain underexplored. This talk, building on Salazkina’s Romancing Yesenia: How a Mexican Melodrama Shaped Global Popular Culture (UC Press, 2024), traces the history of Latin American melodramatic media on socialist film screens from the 1950s to the 1990s. By situating these transnational flows within longer trajectories of global media circulation, it reconsiders Latin America’s role in shaping contemporary “global-popular” culture.

Amalia Córdova

Amalia Córdova is a Supervisory Museum Curator at the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, where she co-directs the Mother Tongue Film Festival. She was a Latin American program specialist for the Film + Video Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, served as Assistant Director of New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and taught at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She obtained a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies and an M.A. in Performance Studies, both from New York University. She is from Santiago, Chile/Wallmapu.

Keynote Lecture. Frames of Resistance: The Cinemas of Abya Yala (Friday Morning)

In Frames of Resistance: The Cinemas of Abya Yala (Oxford University Press, 2025), Amalia I. Córdova Hidalgo examines how Indigenous filmmakers make their cultural vitality visible on screen. She explores the development of collectives, analyzes select works, and uncovers the links between these filmmakers and global cinema. Córdova foregrounds first-person accounts of this movement through new translations of excerpts from films, as well as speeches, interviews, and pronouncements by filmmakers at live events. The result is a book that builds upon Indigenous principles of organization and reciprocal ways of being, offering proposals for teaching practices, circulating these films, and ensuring long-term access to this important body of work.

Bryce Henson

Bryce Henson is an associate professor in the Department of Communication & Journalism and an associate faculty in the Africana Studies Program at Texas A&M University. His books include the award-winning Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil as well as the edited volume, Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization. Previously, he was a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Racial Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia. Currently, he serves on the advisory board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) and is an associate editor for Transforming Anthropology.

Keynote Lecture. Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Hip-Hop in Brazil (Saturday Morning)

Known as Black Rome, Salvador da Bahia is a predominantly Black city where the local art, food, and music are strongly associated with African roots.  Yet, many Black Brazilian residents are socially, politically, and economically marginalized. Based on ethnographic research, this talk illuminates how Black Bahian hip-hop artists and their circles contest structures of anti-Black racism by creating safe havens of rest and refuge as well as alternative social, cultural, and political systems for Black people. That is, they recreate quilombos in contemporary Brazil. This talk ends by advocating for the importance of Black studies to understanding race and racialization, media and popular culture, and freedom dreams amongst African Diasporic communities in Latin America.

Cecilia Aldarondo 

Cecilia Aldarondo is a director-producer from the Puerto Rican diaspora who works at the intersection of poetics and politics. Her feature documentaries MEMORIES OF A PENITENT HEART (2016) and LANDFALL (2020) premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and were co-produced by the PBS series POV. Her third feature YOU WERE MY FIRST BOYFRIEND had its World Premiere at the 2023 South by Southwest Film Festival and is now streaming on HBO. Among Aldarondo’s fellowships and honors are the 2024 Borderlands Visionary Fellowship, the Guggenheim, a three-time MacDowell Colony Fellowship, the IDA Emerging Filmmaker Award, the New America Fellowship, and Women at Sundance. Her newest co-directed film DEAR MS: A REVOLUTION IN PRINT premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Film Festival and is currently streaming on HBO Max. Cecilia teaches at Williams College and is in development on her debut fiction feature.

Film Screening: You Were My First Boyfriend (Thursday Night at the Broad Theater)

In this high school reunion movie turned inside out, filmmaker Cecilia Aldarondo embarks on a fantastical quest to reconcile her tortured teen years. She ‘goes back’ in more ways than one, tracking down old foes and friends alike, and re-staging her most primal humiliations while casting herself as a teenager. In a cathartic, time-bending process of letting go, Cecilia is forced to confront the flawed memories she’s held onto for years. Oscillating between present and past, hallucination and reality, You were my First Boyfriend is a hybrid documentary that explores the power of adolescent fantasy, the subtle violence of cultural assimilation, and the funhouse mirror of time’s passage.

In this talk, Cecilia Aldarondo follows the threads of un-belonging and diasporic border crossings endemic to her filmmaking practice.

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

Juan Carlos Rodríguez (Ph.D., Program in Literature, Duke University, 2007) is Associate Professor of Spanish at Georgia Tech, co-director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center, and co-editor of the collections of essays New Documentaries in Latin America (Palgrave, 2014) and Digital Humanities in Latin America (University Press of Florida, 2020). He is also co-editing a book series, Reframing Media, Technology, and Culture in Latin/o America, for the University of Florida Press. His research focuses on Latin American documentaries from perspectives informed by sustainability, critical theory, urban and environmental studies, and digital humanities. As an educator and scholar, Rodríguez has a strong record of community engagement. He is the founding director of Georgia Tech’s Global Media Festival: Sustainability Across Languages and Cultures. His public digital humanities project Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive, is a collection of video interviews that tells the story of demilitarization in the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. Using materials from the Vieques Struggle project, he just completed his first long feature documentary, Vieques: A Living Archive, which covers the history of Vieques before and after the departure of the US Navy from the island in 2003.

Documentary Screening: Vieques: A Living Archive (Friday Night at the Village Theater)

In a gripping and unpredictable 20-year quest, Juan Carlos Rodríguez showcases the poignant story of Vieques. Through intimate recollections, community voices, and archival footage, the film exposes the profound hardships endured by Viequenses before and after the US Navy’s departure in 2003. This documentary examines how a demilitarized community confronts social, economic, and environmental challenges. The film focuses on the environmental and health costs of the US military presence while looking at the dilemmas of post-Navy Vieques.

Conference Presenters

Ahryeong Hong (Tulane University)

Alejandra Bronfman (SUNY Albany)

Alexander Fattal (University of California, San Diego)

Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria)

Alicia Echavarria (Northwestern University)

Amalia Córdova (Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage)

Ana Llurba (Rutgers University)

Ana María Granados Romero (Graduate Center, CUNY)

Analays Álvarez Hernández (Université de Montréal)

Anastasia Valecce (Spelman College)

Angel Carrasco (University of Southern California)

Anisell Esparza (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)

Antonio Gómez (Tulane University)

Barbara Galindo (University of California Riverside)

Brenda Borges (Tulane University)

Bryce Henson (Texas A&M University)

Carlos Gerardo González Orellana (Tulane University)

Carolina Caballero (Tulane University)

Carolina Dávila (New York University)

Carolina Sánchez (Tulane University)

Catherine Benamou (University of California-Irvine)

Cecilia Aldarondo (Williams College)

Cecily Raynor (McGill University)

Christine Hernández (Tulane University)

David Tenorio (University of Pittsburgh)

Dunja Fehimović (Newcastle University)

Emily A. Maguire (Northwestern University)

Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas (Northwestern University)

Ezra Remer (Tulane University)

Farides Lugo Zuleta (University of California Riverside)

Freya Schiwy (University of California Riverside)

Gabriela Cruz (University of California Los Angeles)

Gabrielle Corona (Princeton University)

Gayle Williams (Florida International University)

Gerardo Pignatiello (Binghamton University-SUNY)

Gilberto Balsini (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)

Hannah Palmer (Tulane University)

Ignacio Sarmiento (California State University, Northridge)

Irene Depetris Chauvin (Universidad de Buenos Aires / CONICET)

Isabella Vergara (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)

Isdanny Morales Sosa (Tulane University)

Ivonne Cotorruelo Pérez (University of Connecticut)

Jack Riordan (University of Texas at Austin)

Jacqueline Amezcua (Tulane University)

Jacqueline Avila (University of Texas at Austin)

Jacqueline Loss (University of Connecticut)

Joaquín Serpe (Emerson College)

Jonathan Risner (Indiana University Bloomington)

Jorge Marcone (Rutgers University)

José Jasán Nieves Cárdenas (El Toque)

José Luis Suárez Morales (Texas Christian University)

José Miguel Palacios (California State University Long Beach)

Jossianna Arroyo (The University of Texas at Austin)

Juan Andres Bello (University of Western Ontario)

Juan Antonio García Borrero (Investigador Independiente)

Juan Carlos Rodríguez (The Georgia Institute of Technology)

Juan Llamas-Rodriguez (University of Pennsylvania)

Julia Medina (University of San Diego)

Julia Nava (University of California, Irvine)

Justo Planas (Le Moyne College)

Katerina Ramos-Jordán (Brown University)

Laura Serna (University of Southern California)

Laura-Zoë Humphreys (Tulane University)

Luisela Alvaray (DePaul University)

Luz Mely Reyes (Efecto Cocuyo)

Margaret Frohlich (Dickinson College)

Maria C Cumana (Tulane University)

María del Carmen Caña Jiménez (Virginia Tech)

María Elena Cepeda (Williams College)

Maria Isabel Messina (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)

Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz (University of California, Santa Cruz)

Mary Leonard (University of Cincinnati)

Masha Salazkina (Concordia University)

Maximiliano de la Puente (CONICET)

Maybel Mesa Morales (Lycoming College)

Michelle Leigh Farrell (Fairfield University)

Mike Levine (Christopher Newport University)

Moira Fradinger (Yale University)

Mónica-Ramón Ríos (Pratt Institute)

Nahuel Ribke (The Open University of Israel)

Nathan Rossi (Northwestern University)

Néstor Arce Aburto (Divergentes)

Nils Longueira Borrego (California State University, Fullerton)

Oriele Benavides (Princeton University)

Pablo Zavala (Loyola University)

Pedro Noel Doreste Rodríguez (Michigan State University)

Patricia Arroyo Calderón (University of California Los Angeles)

Reynaldo Lastre (College of the Holy Cross)

Ruth Goldberg (SUNY Empire State College)

Sarah Brokenborough (Tulae University)

Susannah Rodríguez Drissi (University of California Los Angeles)

Susanne Hackett (Tulane University)

Ted A. Henken (Baruch College, CUNY)

Teresa Clifton (Tulane University)

Thomas Matusiak (University of Miami)

Vinodh Venkatesh (Virginia Tech)

Watufani Poe (Tulane Univerisity)

Wilfredo José Burgos Matos (Lehman College, CUNY)

Willamys Melo (University of Santa Catarina)

Vania Barraza (University of Memphis)

Yeidy M. Rivero (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)

Zaira Zarza (Université de Montréal)

Zorimar Rivera Montes (Tulane University)