Plenary Speakers
Click on each plenary talk title to access the abstract.
Kalenda Eaton
Kalenda Eaton is an Associate Professor in The Clara Luper Department of African and African American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and Director of Oklahoma Research for the Black Homesteader Project funded by the National Park Service in partnership with the Center for Great Plains Studies. Dr. Eaton is a humanities scholar focused on African American western studies, intersections of Black literary studies and feminist criticism; African American social and cultural history; and Black Diaspora studies. Recent publications include “Black Women Writers Reclaiming Western Literature,” the co-edited New Directions in Black Western Studies, and “Teaching the Black West” (with Michael Johnson in Teaching Western American Literature). Dr. Eaton is a Fulbright scholar, SSRC Mellon-Mays Fellow, and held the Steinbrucker Endowed Chair in Humanities and Social Sciences at Arcadia University from 2017-2019, where she also founded and directed a Humanities Research Lab.
Yogita Goyal
Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of two monographs: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU, 2019), winner of the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA. She is also the guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Literatures (2014), editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017), co-editor of a special issue of American Literary History on “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees” (2022), and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature (2015-2022). Past President of A.S.A.P., the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, she has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature.
Ana María Manzanas Calvo
Ana María Manzanas Calvo is Professor of American Literature at the University of Salamanca. Together with Prof. Jesús Benito, she directs the editorial series “Critical Approaches to Ethnic American Literature,” published in its first years by Rodopi and currently by Brill (ranked 11th in the world). Apart from articles in high-ranked journals, she is coauthor of the monographs Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces, Bodies, Borders (Routledge 2017); Cities, Borders, and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film (Routledge 2011); Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realisms in Ethnic American Literatures (Rodopi 2009); and Intercultural Mediations: Mimesis and Hybridity in American Literature (Lit Verlag, 2003). She has co-edited several volumes, such as Border Transits: Literature and Culture across the Line (Rodopi 2007), Literature and Ethnicity in the Cultural Borderlands (Rodopi 2002) and Narratives of Resistance: Literature and Ethnicity in the United States and the Caribbean (UCLM 1999).
Begoña Simal-González
Begoña Simal-González teaches at the Universidade da Coruña, where she coordinates the American Studies Research Group (CLEU). She has written extensively on ethnic literatures and magical realism; her latest work focuses on ecocriticism and transnational studies. She has published several books, among them Uncertain Mirrors: Magical Realisms in US Ethnic Literatures, with Jesús Benito and Ana Manzanas (Rodopi 2011) and Ecocriticism and Asian American Literature: Gold Mountains, Weedflowers and Murky Globes (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). Her articles have appeared in journals such as MELUS, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Concentric or Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, as well as in essay collections published by Palgrave Macmillan, Brill, Rodopi or Routledge.