About the Speakers

Luis Alberto Cortés is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies and American Literature of the US at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, where he also serves as the Interim Freshman Sophomore English Coordinator. Luis obtained his Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His scholarship explores the modern cultural inheritance of colonial mechanisms destroying bodies and epistemologies deemed expungeable by dominant hegemonic society, with an emphasis in the US-Mexico border, ethnic enclaves, and prison/detention centers of the United States. He currently has two edited collection chapters, and one book review scheduled for publication in 2024, with an additional two chapters under review with academic journals.

The daughter of a refugee father from China and an immigrant mother from Jamaica, whose parents themselves were immigrants from Hong Kong, Jennifer Ho is the director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is past president of the Association for Asian American Studies (2020-2022), the editor of four essay collections, the author of three scholarly monographs and a number of essays and articles, both research oriented and public facing. In addition to her academic work, Ho is active in community engagement around issues of race and intersectionality.

Shermaine M. Jones is an Associate Professor of African American Literature in the English Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research is concerned with Blackness, the politics of mourning, and antiracist pedagogy.  Her publications include, “I CAN’T BREATHE!” Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric in South Journal; and “Unbounded Grief”: Black Maternal Sorrow and the Literature of Slavery” in Gender in American Literature and Culture Anthology, Cambridge University Press and “Breath-taking Pedagogy: Self-care & Ethical Pedagogy in the Climate of Anti-Blackness and COVID-19” in Radical Teacher. She is currently working on a book project entitled “Breath-taking Pedagogy: Urgent Teaching Practices in a Time of Precarious Breath.”

Kevin Pyon is Assistant Professor of American Literature, Race, and Ethnic Studies at Penn State Harrisburg. His teaching and research are focused on the intersections between early American literature, Black studies, and political theology. 

Cristina Stanciu is Professor of English and Director of the Humanities Research Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the author of The Makings and Unmakings of Americans: Indians and Immigrants in American Culture, 1879-1924 (Yale University Press, 2023), the editor of the volume Our Democracy and the American Indian and Other Writings by Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Syracuse UP, 2015) and of several journal special issues, including a special issue on "Indigenous Periodicals" for American Periodicals (2023, with Jill Doerfler and Oliver Scheiding). With Gary Totten, she has edited the volume Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom (U of Illinois P, 2024) and with Jill Doerfler and Oliver Scheiding, she has edited the volume Indigenous Media Ecologies (under review, U Nebraska P).

Gary Totten is Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Editor-in-Chief of the journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. He is the author or editor of a number of books and articles on late nineteenth- and twentieth-century US literature, multiethnic literature, and travel writing, including African American Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural Work in the Age of Jim Crow (2015), A Companion to the Multiethnic Literature of the United States (2024), and, with Cristina Stanciu, Race in the Multiethnic Literature Classroom (2024).