Telling Stories, Telling Silences: Life-writing, Censorship, and Voice

Allison Adair

Originally from central Pennsylvania, Allison Adair is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Arts & Letters, Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Kenyon Review Online, North American Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Florida Review Editors’ Award, the Orlando Prize, and first place in Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition, Adair lives in Boston, where she teaches at Boston College and GrubStreet.

Ana Diaz Burgos

Ana María Díaz Burgos is an associate professor of Hispanic Studies at Oberlin College and specializes in Spanish and Spanish American early modern literature and culture with an emphasis on gender studies and social history. Her research focuses on the impact of institutional practices and legal systems on the creation of female subjectivities in Hispanic territories. Her work has appeared in a variety of edited volumes and academic journals. Her book Tráfico de saberes: Agencia femenina, hechicería e inquisición en Cartagena de Indias 1610-1614 (Iberoamericana-Vervuert 2020) studies the first inquisitorial prosecution of female sorcery in early seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias.

Arianne Chernock

Arianne Chernock is a Professor of History and Associate Dean of the Faculty for the Social Sciences at Boston University. She is the author of two books, Men and the Making of Modern British Feminism (2010) and The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women: Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement (2019). She also enjoys writing shorter pieces for a number of print and media outlets.

Elizabeth Graver

Elizabeth Graver’s fifth novel, Kantika, was inspired by her grandmother, Rebecca née Cohen Baruch Levy, who was born into a Sephardic Jewish family in Istanbul and whose tumultuous and shape-shifting life journey took her to Spain, Cuba and finally New York. Kantika is due out in April 2023 from Metropolitan Books, with German and Turkish editions also forthcoming. Elizabeth’s fourth novel, The End of the Point, was long-listed for the 2013 National Book Award. Her other novels are Awake, The Honey Thief, and Unravelling. Her story collection, Have You Seen Me?, won the 1991 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Best American Essays. The mother of two young adult daughters, she teaches at Boston College.

Erin Goodman

Erin Goodman directs the visiting scholars and fellows program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, a position she has held since 2021. Previously, she was associate director for academic programs at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (2014–2018). In addition to her “day job,” Erin is also a professional translator, with much of her recent work focusing on Cuba. She has translated several books and many academic articles in a variety of disciplines and genres, and is also co-editor of three volumes centered on historical and collective memory. From 2019–2021 she was the lead translator from Spanish to English for The New York Times Opinion Section.

Gretchen Starr-LeBeau

Gretchen Starr-LeBeau is the Jeanne and George Todd Professor of Religious Studies at Principia College in Elsah, Illinois. She researches and writes about early modern Inquisitions and particularly investigations of Jewish converts to Christianity and their descendants. Her first book, In the Shadow of the Virgin, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in history, and her most recent book, Seven Myths about the Spanish Inquisition, is forthcoming from Hackett later this summer.

Jonathan Adler

Jonathan Adler is a Professor of Psychology at Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston. He is also a Visiting Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Review, and Chief Academic Officer of Health Story Collaborative, a non-profit organization aimed at elevating storytelling in the medical ecosystem. Professor Adler’s research focuses on the ways in which narrative fosters a sense of identity and supports psychological well-being, especially across the adult lifespan. In the last five years this work has focused on narrative identity development among people with disabilities. Professor Adler’s research has been covered by The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, The Today Show, and other media outlets. Professor Adler is also a theater director and playwright. His play, Reverse Transcription, co-authored with Jim Petosa, premiered Off-Broadway in July, 2022 at The Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, produced by PTP/NYC.

Karen Melvin

Karen Melvin is Thomas Hedley Reynolds Professor of History at Bates College, where she is also a member of the Latin American and Latinx Studies Program. She writes about colonial Mexico and global Catholicism, including an ongoing book project about two global charities in New Spain: maintaining a Catholic presence in the Holy Land and redeeming Christian captives from North Africa.

Karin Vélez

Karin Vélez is currently teaching History at Macalester College. She is an intellectual/narrative historian by training, specializing in religious encounters in the early modern period (1500-1750). She is obsessed with how myths and other implausible events might resonate more than actual happenings, and feels a personal mission to put the story back in history. Karin teach courses on magic and science; conquest and conversion; pirates, translators and missionaries—a comparison across categories; and world history course on oceans and “rumors”/fake news. Her research focuses on episodes of the “miraculous” or unexpected: animals impacting conversion zones, churches falling on faithful converts, houses flying across oceans, and other moments of bizarre cross-cultural and trans-religious convergence.

Katherine Hill

Katherine Hill is the author of two novels, The Violet Hour (Scribner 2013) and A Short Move, (Ig Publishing 2020), which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. With Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, and Juno Jill Richards, she is also co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism (Columbia University Press 2020), which won the PROSE Award in Literature from the Association of American Publishers and an Honorable Mention in the MLA Prize for Collaborative, Bibliographical, or Archival Scholarship. Her fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. Katherine is Associate Professor of English at Adelphi University, where she teaches creative writing and literature to undergraduate and MFA students.

Katrina Olds

Katrina Olds is Professor and Chair of History at the University of San Francisco. She studies the history of ideas ‘from below’ by examining how erudition and popular culture overlapped and informed religion and society in the early modern period. Her first monograph, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain (Yale, 2015) analyzed a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit’s forged histories and was recognized by the American Catholic Historical Association withthe John Gilmary Shea Prize. She has also written on the authentication of saints’ relics in the Counter Reformation; the eclectic methods of Spanish antiquaries; and on relics, saints, and memory in Spain and the Americas.

Manuela Ceballos

A native of Medellín, Colombia, Manuela Ceballos studies Islamic and Christian mystical literature in the medieval and early modern Western Mediterranean. She completed her dissertation at Emory University in 2016. She has published articles on mysticism and violence, the historiographical concept of convivencia (the coexistence of Jews, Muslims, and Christians in Islamic Spain), and has a forthcoming article on the hagiographical account of a sixteenth-century Muslim saint of Christian and Jewish ancestry. She regularly teaches "Introduction to the Study of Islam," and other courses that focus on literature, history, and culture in the Muslim West. Before focusing on the study of Islam, Dr. Ceballos earned a B.A in French and Comparative Literature and an M.A. in French from Bryn Mawr College and worked as an English as a Second Language instructor for refugees in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Min Song

Min Hyoung Song is the Chair of the English Department and Director of the Asian American Studies Program. His most recent book is entitled Climate Lyricism. He is also the author of two other books, The Children of 965: On Writing and Not Writing as an Asian American and Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots.

Rachel Nolan

Rachel Nolan is Contributing Editor at Harper’s Magazine and has written for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New York Review of Books and for the Salvadoran investigative news outlet El Faro. She is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University. Her first book will be published January 2024.

Sean McEnroe

Sean McEnroe is a historian of intellectual and political life in the early modern Atlantic World with a particular interest in the interaction of European and Indigenous worldviews. He has written two books on the subject: From Colony to Nationhood in Mexico and A Troubled Marriage. Sean's current book project treats the circulation of ideas about technology and magic in the nineteenth century. He was educated at UC Berkeley and teaches now at Southern Oregon University.

Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón

Sergio Gutiérrez Negrón is a scholar and writer. His academic research focuses on 19th-century Latin American intellectual history and cultural studies, as well as on 20th-century Mexican and Caribbean literatures. He has recently published articles on literature and ethics, ugliness and liberty, and nineteenth-century conservatism. His scholarly monograph, Mexico, Interrupted: Labor, Idleness, and the Economic Imaginary of Independence, will be published in June 2023 by Vanderbilt University Press. He is author of the novels Los días hábiles (2020), Dicen que los dormidos (2014), and Palacio (2011), and the short-story collection Preciosos perdedores (2019).

Sylvia Sellers-García

Sylvia Sellers-García is a historian of colonial Central America and a fiction writer. Her most recent historical work, The Woman on the Windowsill: A Tale of Mystery in Several Parts (Yale U. Press, 2020) bridges the academic and popular history genres. She has published literary fiction for adults (When the Ground Turns in Its Sleep, Riverhead 2008), science fiction for YA readers (The Waning Age, Viking, 2019) and fantasy for middle-grade readers (The Mapmakers Trilogy, Viking, 2014, 2015, 2016).

William B. Taylor

William B. Taylor is Muriel McKevitt Sonne Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of California, Berkeley. His books on Latin American history include Fugitive Freedom: The Improbable Lives of Two Impostors in Late Colonial Mexico, Theater of a Thousand Wonders: A History of Miraculous Images and Shrines in New Spain, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages, and Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico.