Advisory Board

Natalia Brizuela received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2003. She is a professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Film & Media. Her research focuses on photography, film and contemporary art, critical theory and aesthetics of both Spanish America and Brazil. (more here)

Anthony Cascardi, Dean of Arts and Humanities at UC Berkeley, works on literature and philosophy, aesthetics, and early modern literature, with an emphasis on Spanish, English, and French. He is especially interested in the Spanish Baroque and frequently teaches courses on Cervantes and on aesthetic theory. He is a professor of Comparative Literature, Rhetoric, and Spanish. (more here)

Chiyuma Elliott (ARC Acting Director, Fall 2021) is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, visual culture, and intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi.  (more here)

Nadia Ellis specializes in black diasporic, Caribbean, and postcolonial literatures and cultures.Her book, Territories of the Soul: Queered Belonging in the Black Diaspora (Duke, 2015), explores forms of black belonging animated by queer utopian desire and diasporic aesthetics. Her research includes work on queer and black performance, sexuality and the archive, and the diasporic city. She teaches courses on a range of topics within her fields, regularly offering classes on black and postcolonial literary cultures. (more here)

Timothy Hampton holds the Aldo Scaglione and Marie M. Burns Distinguished Professorship and directs the Townsend Humanities Center.  He works on Renaissance and early modern European culture, in both English and the Romance languages. His research and teaching involve the relationship between politics and culture, and focus on such issues as the ideology of literary genre, the literary construction of nationhood, the relationship of poetry and music, and the history of diplomacy.  (more here)

Kathryn MacKay hails from Toronto, where she served as the programmer and interim artistic director of The Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, one of North America’s largest festivals of alternative cinema and media art. MacKay’s programming activities have also included positions as guest curator at the Ryerson Image Centre; guest programmer for TIFF Cinematheque; programming associate for Wavelengths, Toronto International Film Festival; curator of installations for The 8Fest; and as a guest presenter moderating conversations with visiting filmmakers at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. (more here)

Alex Saum-Pascual is a digital artist, poet and professor. She is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches Contemporary Spanish Literature and Culture (20th and 21st Centuries) and Electronic Literature (Digital Humanities). She is also part of the Executive Committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media and the board of directors of the Electronic Literature Organization. Her academic work on digital media and literature in the Spanish-speaking world has been published in Spain, Mexico and the United States. Her digital artwork and poetry has been exhibited in galleries and art festivals in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Norway and the UK. (more here and here)

Beth Piatote is author of two books: a mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019); and a scholarly monograph, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), as well as numerous essays and short stories stories in journals and anthologies. Her recent work, The Beadworkers, has been long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize. She is currently associate professor of Native American Studies, where she specializes in Native American literature and law; Nez Perce language and literature; Indigenous Language Revitalization; and creative writing. She earned a PhD from Stanford University. (more here)

Rena Rosenwasser was born in New York City in 1950. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1971, she moved to California, where, in 1974, she helped found Kelsey Street Press, where she continues to serve as its co-director. Between 1987 and 2006 Rosenwasser initiated and produced a series of collaborations between poets and visual artists that established Kelsey Street Press as the premiere and longest lived independent publisher of literature for women. (more here)

Hazel White‘s public work includes presentations at SFMOMA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts,
and Headlands Center for the Arts, where she was an affiliate artist for several years and her work is part of the Key Room permanent collection. She’s a recipient of a Creative Work Fund grant and finalist for the California Book Award, National Poetry Series, and Fence Ottoline Prize. (more here)