Institute Directors

James J. López is professor of Spanish and co-director of the Center for Martí Studies Affiliate at The University of Tampa. Together with co-director Denis Rey, he hosted the 2019 NEH Summer Institute “José Martí and the Immigrant Communities of Florida”, the 2016 UT-USF International Conference “Martí in Tampa,” which for the first time brought together 20 of the top Martí scholars from Cuba, the U.S. and Mexico in a collaborative effort to study the important relationship between the Cuban patriot and the immigrant cigar workers of Ybor City and West Tampa, and other related conferences and events. In 2014, his Spanish-language translation of the Pulitzer-prize-winning play Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, which is set in the cigar factories of Ybor City in the early 20th century, was produced by the renowned Cuban director Carlos Díaz and Teatro El Público and opened concurrently in Havana and Miami Beach with a mixed Cuban and Cuban-American cast. He is also a literary critic specializing in contemporary Latin American narrative, a translator, was twice awarded the College of Arts and Letters Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award, and in 2019 was awarded the Louise Loy Hunter Award for Outstanding Faculty Member at The University of Tampa. López is a Tampa native and the grandson of cigar workers, including the last living lector, or reader, a position that figures prominently in the history that will be studied during this institute.

Denis Rey is a political scientist specializing in international relations and Latin American politics. His scholarship has appeared in academic journals such as Global Environmental Politics, Journal of Information Technology and Politics, and Social Science Quarterly. Together with James López, he co-directs the Center for José Martí Studies Affiliate at the University of Tampa. His current research seeks to understand Cuba’s integration into the global economy and how trade affects artistic expression in the Caribbean and Latin America. He has presented his research at the Cuba at the Crossroads symposium at Rollins College; the international conference, Les Partenariats Transatlantique et Transpacifique a l ere de l Interconnexion, organized by Centre D’Estudes Sur L’Integration et la Mondialisation at the University of Quebec at Montreal, Canada; and the Caribbean Studies Association 2017 annual conference in Nassau, Bahamas. Rey, who was born in Cuba, immigrated to the United States in 1968. He has traveled extensively throughout Cuba and has taught courses in Havana that focus on US-Cuba relations.

Visiting Faculty

Rodney Kite-Powell is the director of the Touchton Map Library and the Saunders Foundation Curator of History at the Tampa Bay History Center. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Florida and a Master of Arts from the University of South Florida. He has written extensively on the history of Tampa and Hillsborough County and is the editor of Tampa Bay History, a regional journal published through a partnership between the History Center and the University of South Florida Libraries. He has also served as an adjunct professor at both The University of Tampa and the University of South Florida, teaching courses on the history of Florida.

His first book, History of Davis Islands: David P. Davis and the Story of a Landmark Tampa Neighborhood, was published in 2013. His latest book, Tampa Bay’s Waterfront: Its History and Development, co-authored with Arthur Savage, was published in 2017.

Gary Mormino is the Frank E. Duckwall professor emeritus in Florida history at University of South Florida-St. Petersburg. He presently holds the position of scholar in residence at the Florida Humanities Council. He earned a dissertation in history from the University of North Carolina and taught at the University of South Florida between 1977 and 2015. His books include The Immigrant World of Ybor City: Italians and Their Latin Neighbors (University of Illinois Press, 1987), co-authored with George Pozzetta, which was awarded the Theodore Saloutos prize for the best book in immigration history. He also wrote Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Florida (University Press of Florida, 2006), which received the Charlton Tebeau prize for the best book in Florida history. In 2007, PBS and WEDU adapted the book into a documentary, The Florida Dream, which was awarded a regional Emmy. He is also the author of two other volumes: Immigrants on the Hill: Italians in St. Louis (University of Illinois Press, 1986), which was awarded the Howard Marraro Prize for the best book in Italian history, and Spanish Pathways in Florida, 1492-1992 (Pineapple Press, 1992). Mormino has received numerous awards and accolades for his work on Florida history, including being honored with the “Distinguished Author” award by the Florida House of Representatives in 2012, and the 2015 Florida Lifetime Achievement Award in writing. He is presently working on a study of Florida, 2000-2012, a monograph on Florida and WWII, a biography of Millard Caldwell and a history of Florida foodways.

Kenya C. Dworkin is a professor of Hispanic studies, with appointments in English, history, global studies, international relations and the Program for Deliberative Democracy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her current book project is Before Latino: How Cuban Theater in Tampa Shaped an American Immigrant Society. Other books include Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage V (Arte Público, 2003), Herencia: The Anthology of U.S. Latino Literature in the United States (Oxford UP, 2003), and En otra voz: Antología de la literatura hispana de los Estados Unidos (Arte Público, 2002). Her most recent articles are “Latin Place Making in the Late 19th & Early 20th Centuries: Cuban Émigrés and their Transnational Impact in Tampa, FL, ELN (October 2018) and “When a "New Deal" Became a Raw Deal: Depression-Era, ‘Latin’ Federal Theatre,” TRANSMODERNITY:Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World (1:1) https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3rd2z64t.

Susan D. Greenbaum is an anthropologist who is retired from the University of South Florida Department of Anthropology. Her research has been divided between 35 years of ethnographic and applied work with members of the Afro-Cuban mutual aid society, La Unión Martí Maceo, and long-term research on housing, racism and urban displacement. Regarding the former, she published an extensive monograph titled More than Black: Afro-Cubans in Tampa (U Press of Florida 2002) that won three significant awards. She has published and lectured widely on the topic of black Cuban cigarmaker/independence fighters in Tampa, and about the experiences and contributions of their descendants in the Civil Rights movement and local politics. Her other interest in the effects of racism on housing, neighborhoods and wealth inequality involves research funded by the National Science Foundation to assess consequences of displacement by the HOPE VI program that demolished most of the public housing in Tampa. She is author of the book, Blaming the Poor: The Long Shadow of the Moynihan Report on Cruel Images of Poverty (Rutgers University Press 2015).

Gerald E. Poyo is O’Connor Professor in the History of Hispanic Texas and the Southwest. In 1983 he received his Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Florida. His research has focused on the intersection of Latin American and U.S. Latino history, especially on the history of Cuban exile communities in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, the origins of Tejano communities in colonial and Mexican Texas, U.S. Latino Catholic History and Latino history writ large. He is the author and editor of seven books, including ‘With All, and For the Good of All’: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848-1898 (Duke University Press, 1989); Cuban Catholics in the United States, 1960-1988: Exile and Integration (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007) and Exile and Revolution: Jose D. Poyo, Key West, and Cuban Independence (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2014).

Lisandro Pérez is a professor of Latin American and Latino studies at John Jay College, City University of New York. He was on the faculty of Florida International University for 25 years, where he served for 13 years as director of its Cuban Research Institute, which he established in 1991. He was editor of the journal Cuban Studies, and author of numerous publications on Cuba and Cuban Americans, including The Legacy of Exile: Cubans in the United States (Allyn & Bacon, 2003), co-authored with Guillermo Grenier. His most recent book is Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York (NYU Press, 2018), the culmination of years of research on the Cuban community in New York City during the 19th century. The book traces how that community was shaped by both the sugar trade and the long struggle for independence from Spain.

The Honorable Judge Emiliano J. Salcines has been a member of the Florida Bar for the last 50 years. A career federal and state prosecuting attorney for 22 years, he was the elected State (Prosecuting) Attorney in Tampa for 16 years. Besides his B.A. and J.D. degrees, he has two Honorary Doctorate degrees. He was knighted by King Juan Carlos of Spain and received the 2008 Good Government Award from Hillsborough County, which annually awards the E. J. Salcines Lifetime Leadership Award. He received the “Champion of Justice Award” from the Tampa Bay Trial Lawyers Association. Judge Salcines is a recognized authority on the history of Florida. He is a frequent speaker at state and local historical society conferences and conventions. He is a founding member and trustee of the Tampa Bay History Center and former vice president of the Tampa Historical Society. He was president of the West Tampa Centennial Society and chairman of Tampa’s award-winning activities celebrating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America that brought the replicas of Columbus’ three ships to Tampa Bay. He currently is the U.S. representative on the Board of Trustees of the Museum of Immigration in Spain.

Ada Ferrer is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University, where she has taught since 1995. She is the recipient of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in History for her book Cuba: An American History (Scribner, 2021). She is the author of Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868–1898, winner of the Berkshire Book Prize for the best first book by a woman in any field of history, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize from the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale University as well as multiple prizes from the American Historical Association. Born in Cuba and raised in the United States, she has been traveling to and conducting research on the island since 1990.

Lillian Guerra received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of many scholarly articles and works of public scholarship, as well as five books of history: Popular Expression and National Identity in Puerto Rico (University Press of Florida, 1998), The Myth of José Martí: Conflicting Nationalisms in Early Twentieth-Century Cuba (University of North Carolina Press, 2005), Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946-1958(Yale University Press, 2018). Visions of Power in Cuba received the 2014 Bryce Wood Book Award from the Latin American Studies Association, its most prestigious prize for a book on Latin America across all fields. Her new book, Patriots and Traitors in Revolutionary Cuba, 1961-1981 will be released in January 2023 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Guerra has also received awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Clay Risen  is the deputy op-ed editor at The New York Times, where he oversees the daily production of the newspaper’s opinion section. A 10-year veteran of The Times, Risen also frequently writes for its business, metropolitan and food and drink sections. He is the author of three critically acclaimed works of history, most recently The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders and the Dawn of the American Century, which The New York Times book review named one of its 50 notable works of nonfiction for 2019. His two previous historical works are The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act and A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination. He has also written two books on whiskey, Sing Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland and American Whiskey, Bourbon and Rye: A Guide to the Nation’s Favorite Spirit. Risen received his undergraduate degree from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a master's degree in social science from the University of Chicago. Before coming to the Times, he worked for The New Republic and Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Risen now lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two children.

Bonnie A. Lucero  is a social historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. Her most recent book, Race and Reproduction in Cuba (2022), interrogates how laws regulating women’s reproduction historically perpetuated gender-specific forms of racial inequality over four centuries. She is also the author of Revolutionary Masculinity and Racial Inequality: Gendering War and Politics in Cuba, 1895-1902 (2018), and A Cuban City, Segregated: Race and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century (2019). She is co-editor of Voices of Crime: Constructing and Contesting Social Control in Modern Latin America (2016). Her current project is a social history of Cuba’s cattle industry as a source of shifting attitudes about the availability, desirability, and consumption of meat. Lucero is the Neville G. Penrose Chair in Latin American Studies and History at Texas Christian University. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, an MPhil in Latin American Studies from the University of Cambridge, and a B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from the University of the Pacific. She is from Richmond, California.

Dalia Antonia Caraballo Muller  is a historian interested in the movement of ideas and people across space and time in the Americas. She is a graduate of Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied Latin American and Caribbean history. She is the author of Cuban Émigrés and Independence in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf World published by UNC Press (2017) and is currently at work on two book projects, one exploring African freedom-seeking/dreaming practices in early twentieth-century Cuba, and a long history of the interconnected “Gulf World” in the Americas. In addition to teaching and research, Muller has served as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education and Director of the University Honors College at the University at Buffalo. She is the founder of the Impossible Project, a transformative learning model for university teaching.

Kelley Kreitz  is an associate professor of English and an affiliate faculty member in Latinx Studies at Pace University in New York City, where she also directs the university's digital humanities center, Babble Lab. Her research on U.S.-based Spanish-language print culture has appeared in American Literary History, American Periodicals, English Language Notes, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, and the digital mapping project C19LatinoNYC.org. She was a co-director of the 2021 NEH-funded working group, “Pursuing the Potential of Digital Mapping in Latinx Studies” and of the 2020 NEH Summer Institute, “City of Print” on New York City print history. She serves on the board of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at the University of Houston and on the steering committee of New York City Digital Humanities (NYCDH). She is completing a book called Electrifying News: A Hemispheric History of the Present in Nineteenth-Century Print Culture.

Maura Barrios is a community historian focused on the history of Tampa’s Cuban communities of West Tampa and Ybor City and the connections between Tampa and Cuba. Maura was curator of the Ybor State Museum exhibit, “Tampa Y Cuba: More Than 100 Years,” 2007. In 2004 she received a major grant from the Florida Humanities Council for the community autobiography project, “Our West Side Stories: Voces de West Tampa, 2005-06. Barrios earned a master’s degree in Latin American history from the University of South Florida in 1998. She has presented her work at Latin American Studies Association, Florida International University-Cuban Research Institute, New College, Tampa Bay History Center, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Houston, and Latino Arts and Culture Institute.

Carolina A. Villarroel  holds a Ph.D. in Spanish literature with a specialization in U.S. Latino Literature and Women's Studies. She is the former archivist in charge of the Mexican American and African American Collections at the Houston Metropolitan Research Center at the Houston Public Library and in 2011, she became a Certified Archivist through the Academy of Certified Archivists. Her expertise in U.S. Latino culture and literature has been fundamental to her positions at the University of Houston (UH), where she is the Brown Foundation Director of Research of the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, a national program whose goal is to identify, preserve, study, and make accessible the written production of Latinos/as in the United States from the colonial period until 1980. Villarroel also teaches literature, research methods and gender studies at the University of Houston. She and her colleague, Gabriela Baeza Ventura, are co-founders of the first US Latina/o digital humanities Center (USLDH).

Institute Staff

Adolfo Lagomasino  is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Communication at the University of Tampa and will serve as the Institute’s on-site coordinator. He specializes in cultural studies, ethnography of place, public/cultural memory and performance studies. His research on the Dérive as mobile ethnographic method was recently published in Liminalities, a performance studies journal. His dissertation and continuing research in exile and transnational identity is grounded in the Tampa-Cuban connection and community.

Sasha Cunillera is a staff assistant for The University of Tampa’s College of Social Sciences, Mathematics and Education and will serve in that capacity for the 2023 NEH Summer Institute.