President
Graciela Martínez Zalce (CISAN-UNAM, Mexico)
Graciela Martínez-Zalce Sánchez actualmente es la Directora del Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte de la UNAM. Doctora en Letras Modernas por la Universidad Iberoamericana. Es miembro del Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (nivel II) y de la Academia Mexicana de las Ciencias. Es especialista en el área de estudios culturales canadienses, adscrita a las líneas de investigación de Migración y Fronteras, e Identidades y procesos culturales. Es profesora del Colegio de Letras Hispánicas de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, así como en el Posgrado en Ciencias Políticas y Sociales. Ha publicado libros y artículos sobre cine y fronteras y las relaciones México-Canadá.
Vice President
Luz Angélica Kirschner (University of South Dakota, USA)
Luz Angélica Kirschner is an Associate Professor in the School of American and Global Studies at South Dakota State University. Her research is located at the intersection of gender, race, human rights, and ethnic studies and focuses on comparative studies from Inter-American and Trans-Atlantic perspectives as it explores how identity formation and difference are mediated through literature and aesthetics as well as impacted by contemporary socio-economic manifestations such as neoliberalism and globalization. Her teaching areas include Latina/o/x Studies, Latin American Literatures and Cultures, US and German Ethnic Literatures, Decolonization, Globalization, Human Rights, Transatlantic Studies, Transnationalism, Inter-American Studies. The “Introductory Course to Inter-American Studies” that she taught during her tenure at Bielefeld University (2008-2016) successfully helped fortify the Inter-American Studies M.A. Program at this institution. Kirschner is editor and author of the volume Expanding Latinidad: An Inter-American Perspective (Bilingual Press 2012). Some of her publications have appeared in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights, The Routledge Companion to Inter-American Studies, The Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, The Routledge Handbook to the History and Society of the Americas, and most recently has authored and co-edited the book Human Rights in the Americas (Routledge 2021). Kirschner is currently completing her single-authored monograph with the working title The Persistence of Racialization: Literature, Gender, and Ethnicity.
Executive Director
Matti Steinitz (Bielefeld University, Germany)
Matti Steinitz holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Bielefeld University. He is co-founder and coordinator of the Black Americas Network and researcher at the Center for InterAmerican Studies. His research interests include Afro-diasporic movements and cultures, popular music, nationalism and transnationalism in the Caribbean, North, and Latin America. He has published articles and organized conferences on hemispheric dialogues between Afrodescendants in the Americas and is a 2018 alumnus of the Mamolen Dissertation Workshop at Harvard University´s Afro-Latin American Research Institute. His dissertation thesis will be published in 2024 by DeGruyter under the title Afro-Latin Soul Music and the Rise of Black Power Cosmopolitanism: ‘Hemispheric Soulscapes’ between Spanish Harlem, Black Rio and Panama. In collaboration with Wilfried Raussert, he has published the edited volume Black Power in Hemispheric Perspective – Movements and Cultures of Resistance in the Black Americas (2022). Matti also works as a DJ and curated the transdisciplinary symposium/festival #hiphophavanaberlin in 2022.
Treasurer
Astrid Haas (University of Bergen, Norway)
Astrid Haas is an Associate Profesor in American Literature and Culture at the University of Bergen, Norway. Previous to her present position, she researched and taught North American Studies as a research fellow, lecturer, and visiting professor at several universities in Germany and the UK. Astrid’s research and teaching interests include transnational North American, Inter-American, and Atlantic Studies; the genres of travel writing, drama, autobiography, and the graphic novel; the literatures and cultures of Black and Latine Diasporas; Gender and Sexuality Studies; the medical humanities; and US popular culture. She published the monographs Stages of Agency: The Contributions of American Drama to the AIDS Discourse (2011) and Lone Star Vistas: Travel Writing on Texas, 1821-1861 (2021). Her current major research project is titled “Black Inter-American Mobilities and Autobiography in the Age of Revolutions (1760-1860).”