Conference Chairs

Richard Perez is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York where he teaches courses on U.S. Latino/a, Caribbean, and Postcolonial literatures. He is concluding a book project entitled Towards a Negative Aesthetics: U.S. Latino/a Fiction and the Remaking of American Literature, which explores the use of the negative in U.S. Latino/a aesthetic formations. Professor Perez is the co-editor of two critical anthologies published by Palgrave Macmillan, Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Criticism (2007) and Moments of Magical Realism in U.S. Ethnic Literatures (2012). He is the co-creator and director of John Jay College's minor in U.S. Latino/a Literature. Professor Perez is also the co-founder of the Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference. His article entitled "The Debt of Memory: Reparations, Imagination, and History in Toni Morrison's Beloved" appeared in Women Studies Quarterly in 2014. His essay "Differential Visions: the Diasporic Stranger, Subalternity, and the Transing of Experience in U.S. Puerto Rican Literature" is forthcoming in The Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature edited by John Moran Gonzalez and Laura Lomas. And his essay entitled "Falied Potential or the Potentiality of Failure: Art, Privation, and Decolonial Memory in Edward Rivera's Family Installments: Memories of Growing Up Hispanic" is forthcoming in Review Journal. His work has also appeared in the Centro Journal for Puerto Rican Studies, Latino Studies Journal, and MELUS Journal.

Belinda Linn Rincón is an Assistant Professor of Latin American and Latina/o Studies and English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where she is the co-founder and co-Director of the U.S. Latina/o Literature Minor Program. She earned her BA in English and Women's Studies from Vassar College, her MA in English from Boston College, and her Ph.D. in English from Cornell University. Her teaching and research interests include Latina/o literature and film, U.S. ethnic literature, feminist and gender studies, and war studies. She specializes in Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. Her first book, Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture (forthcoming 2017, University of Arizona Press), examines Chicana writers and activists whose work critically engages with the histories of war and the militarization of culture and gender. She is the recipient of the Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship as well as fellowships from the American Association of University Women; The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center; the City University of New York's Faculty Fellowship Publication Program; and the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. Rincón has published chapters in The Routledge Companion to Latina/o Literature and Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage (vol. VIII). Her articles appear in Women's Studies Quarterly, Latino Studies, and Modern Fiction Studies (forthcoming). She is the co-founder and co-organizer of the Biennial U.S. Latina/o Literary Theory and Criticism Conference.