Carolina Caballero

At Tulane University since 2008, I. Carolina Caballero now holds a joint appointment at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese since January 2020. She specializes in 20th and 21st-century texts of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora, particularly in the genre of theater and performance. She teaches courses in English and Spanish in literary, cultural, and ethnic studies based in Latin and Latinx America, and well as language courses. She is currently serving as interim advisor for the undergraduate major and minor in Latin American Studies and works to promote and advance the undergraduate program through curriculum development, activities, and networking and travel opportunities for students. As Associate Director of the Cuban and Caribbean Studies Institute since 2012, she also organizes and plans events, hosts speakers, and collaborates on conferences on campus that highlight the region, and promotes travel and research among faculty and graduate students. She also co-directs and teaches on CCSI’s summer abroad programs for undergraduates in Cuba and Panamá. 

Irene Depetris Chauvin

Irene Depetris Chauvin is a Greenleaf Scholar-in-Residence at the Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies and a researcher in Film Studies at the CONICET (Argentina). She has published numerous articles about youth and market culture, affectivity in contemporary cinema, memory studies, geographical and urban imaginaries, art and ecology, and film soundtracks. She is the author of Geografías afectivas. Desplazamientos, prácticas espaciales y modos de estar juntos en el cine de Argentina, Brasil y Chile (LASA, Pittsburgh, 2019), as well as co-editor of Afectos, historia y cultura visual (Prometeo, Buenos Aires, 2019), Más allá de la naturaleza. Imaginarios geográficos en la literatura y el arte latinoamericano reciente (UAH, Santiago de Chile, 2019) and Performances Afectivas. Artes y modos de lo común en América Latina (Teseo, Buenos Aires, 2022). In 2024, she organized special issues for scholarly journals focusing on various topics, including film and philosophy, ecocriticism and visual studies, and environmental humanities and affect. Since 2012, she has been a member of the research group SEGAP (Seminar on Gender, Affect, and Politics) at the University of Buenos Aires. She also contributes to the international grant project “Undoing Affects: Transnational Approaches to the Affective Turn,” which includes collaborators from Argentina, Chile, and the United Kingdom. Currently, she is working on a book tentatively titled “Listening and Touching the Extractive Zones in Latin American Cinema,” which focuses on environmental humanities and affects aesthetics. Additionally, she is writing an article on “Climate Deniers, Structural Apathy, and Ethics.” She enjoys working with students, researchers, curators as well as artists of different ages and cultural origins. 

Laura-Zoë Humphreys

Laura-Zoë Humphreys is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Affiliate Faculty with the Department of Anthropology and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She is an interdisciplinary cinema and media studies scholar who explores public culture and politics under authoritarianism, with a decades-long ethnographic commitment to Cuba in its multiple transnational contexts. Her first monograph, Fidel between the Lines: Paranoia and Ambivalence in Late Socialist Cuban Cinema (Duke UP, 2019), combines ethnography, archival research, and close readings to demonstrate how political paranoia and allegory shape the public sphere under censorship. She is currently working on two book projects: an ethnographic history of analog to offline digital video circulation in Cuba, with particular attention to how this was shaped by gender, race, and their intersections, and a study of the bureaucrat comedy in state socialism and liberal capitalism. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Louisiana Board of Regents (ATLAS Program), among others, and her writing has also appeared in boundary 2, Discourse, Social Text, and the International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Carolina Sánchez        

Carolina Sánchez is a Zemurray-Stone Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University. She received her PhD in Latin American Literature and Culture from Rutgers-New Brunswick as a Fulbright scholar. She also holds an MA in Literary Criticism and a BA in Philosophy from the National University of Colombia. Since 2020, she has been one of the editors of the online Plataforma Latinoamericana de Humanidades Ambientales. Some of her publications include: “La tierra y la sombra: cine háptico, violencia ambiental y desplazamiento forzado en Colombia” in Tekoporá. Revista Latinoamericana de Humanidades Ambientales y Estudios Territoriales (2021); “Public secrets, private violence: A reading of Laura Restrepo’s Delirio” in the book Human Rights in Colombian Literature and Cultural Production, Routledge (2022); “La represa es una forma de frontera. Una noción de memoria histórica ambiental a partir de la obra de Carolina Caycedo” in Revista Escritos (2024); and “The Material and Geological Writing of Cristina Rivera Garza” in Asap Review (2024). She is the coeditor and author of the book Un gabinete para el futuro and the author of the bilingual poetry book Viaje / Voyage. She is currently working on publications about environmental issues related to plants and water in intermedial artworks from Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela.

Ava H. L’Herisse

Ava H. L’Herisse is the Operations Manager in the Department of Communication within Tulane University’s School of Liberal Arts. In this role, she oversees all administrative functions, including budget management, staff supervision, and departmental operations. A trusted advisor on departmental matters, Mrs. L’Herisse manages event logistics, faculty, and guest travel arrangements, and ensures compliance with university policies. She also serves as a key liaison with university offices and plays a vital role in onboarding and training new staff. Her work supports the department’s mission by coordinating programs and initiatives that assist faculty and enhance operational efficiency.

Hannah Palmer 

As the Assistant Director for Academic Projects and Programs, Hannah Palmer oversees academic enrichment programming, digital humanities projects, and summer abroad initiatives at Tulane’s Stone Center for Latin American Studies. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her interests include contemporary literature, critical Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and interdisciplinary and decolonial methodologies. In her research, teaching, and administrative work alike, she enjoys exploring new areas of inquiry and forms of instruction.

Valerie McGinley

Valerie McGinley is the Associate Director of Administration and has been with the Stone Center since 1995. Her responsibilities include managing the administrative and operational support for all aspects of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies including program planning, budgeting, human resources, space management, and other operations, in addition to overseeing grants, sponsored projects, their fiscal management and compliance, supervising public relations, media initiatives, and the international programs of the Stone Center. Previous to her current position she coordinated educational outreach activities through the Latin American Resource Center. She holds a B.A. in Spanish and a M.Ed. in Second Language Instruction, both from Tulane University, and taught high school Spanish and adult ESL in the metro-New Orleans area. 

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The organizers of this conference would also like to thank Tom Reesse, the Director of the Stone Center for Latin American Studies; Mariana Fontaiña for her contributions to the communication strategies; Douglas Miller for his work on graphic design; and Marina Ruiz, Lily Markus, and Sheccid Rodríguez for their work on the website.