Alejandro Cortazar

Obtained his PhD in Hispanic Studies (1997) from The University of Iowa and his MA (1992) and BA (1989) from Arizona State University. He is currently an associate professor of Spanish at Louisiana State University, Department of World Languages, Literatures and Cultures where he has served in several occasions as the MA in Hispanic Studies program Graduate Advisor. He specializes in the literature and culture of nineteenth-century Hispanic America; Mexican Literature and culture from pre-colonial to present times; and Hispanic Women Writer from nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first centuries. Some of his publications include “Departing from reality. Perico’s coming of age and his ‘natural’ farewell from the hacienda during the Porfiriato” (2024), “Perico (1885). En los márgenes del porfiriato: Percepción y realidad de los subalternos” (2023), “Narrando la nación: virtudes republicanas y justicia de Dios ante el desencanto positivista del siglo XIX” (2022), “Notas sobre los insólito y conceptos de antropología en Borges y Carpentier” (2019), “El antihéroe de ‘necio quijotismo’ en Tomochic (1893) de Heriberto Frías” (2013), “Lenguaje, Arte y Revoluciones Ayer y Hoy: New Approaches to Linguistic, Literary, and Cultural Studies” (2011), and “Emancipación, romanticismo y consolidación de las letras criollas: el caso de ‘El criollo’ (1837) de José Ramón Pacheco” (2009).

Sarah Franzen

Sarah Franzen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Anthropology and an Affiliated Faculty in African And African American Studies at LSU. Her research broadly focuses on the diverse ways of knowing embedded in practices associated with farming and how these practices can be used to retain culture, foster environmental relationships, build institutions, or create social change. In her research, Franzen uses film as a tool to better understand the tacit, embodied, affective, and sensory aspects of these practices. Franzen has worked extensively with African American farmers and farm cooperatives as a researcher, filmmaker, and participant. Her published work has addressed issues of visual and participatory research, land rights, kinship, cooperative development, environmental perceptions, and wealth production.

Catherine O. Jacquet

Catherine O. Jacquet is the Luke V. Guarisco Distinguished Associate Professor of history and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Louisiana State University where she teaches courses in US history, women’s history, the history of sexuality, LGBTQ activism, and history of prisons. Her book The Injustices of Rape: How Activists Responded to Sexual Violence, 1950-1980 was published with the University of North Carolina Press in Fall 2019. Her research has been published in the Journal of Women’s History and the Radical History Review. Her current research examines activism by incarcerated people and their allies against sexual violence in carceral institutions in the late 20th century. 

Katelyn E. Knox

Katelyn E. Knox is the Jacques Arnaud Associate Professor of French at Louisiana State University. Author of Race on Display in 20th- and 21st-Century France (Liverpool University Press, 2016) and numerous articles that have appeared in Contemporary French Civilization, Modern & Contemporary France, Research in African Literatures, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE), and L’Esprit créateur, her work explores representations of race, ethnicity, and national identity in postcolonial and contemporary France through broad cultural studies inquiries. She is now working on a second monograph under contract with Liverpool University Press tentatively titled Re-Sounding Lineages: Traumatic Origins, Black Masculinities, and Intermediality in Contemporary Francophone Immigration and Afropean Literature which explores questions of Black male genealogies and (af)filiative networks in 21st-century literary works prominently featuring musical intermediality by authors such as Bessora, Léonora Miano, Alain Mabanckou, Insa Sané, Edgar Sekloka, and Apkass. 

J. Edward Osborne

J. Edward Osborne is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the Department of English at Louisiana State University. His research explores rhetorical formations drawn from race and ethnicity, particularly African American rhetorics, and their function within broader discursive contexts. He co-edited (with Ellen Cushman and Damián Baca) Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference (Routledge, 2018), a volume of texts foundational to a pluriversal rhetorical perspective that challenges the traditional Eurocentric conception of the discipline. His current monograph project, tentatively titled From Fairmont to Freedom: The Rhetoric of Black Conservative Thought, attends to the rhetoric of the Black right: how they frame freedom for Black people, the rhetorical structure of their movement, and the complexities of considering race, memory, and agency in the pursuit of freedom.

Mari Rethelyi

Mari Rethelyi is an associate professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, and the Director of the Jewish Studies Program at LSU. She received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her research interests are in modern Hungarian Jewish history and literature, Jewish race theories, the history of nationalism, and Orientalism. Her articles have been published in journals such as Women in Judaism, Hungarian Studies, East European Jewish Studies, and The Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. She currently works on a monograph, titled, Raceless Race of the Orient: Jewish Nationalism in Fin de Siècle Hungary, that specifically examines the appearance of nationalistic romanticism about the Orient among religiously progressive Hungarian Jews.