WISPS Annual Conference 2019

In 2019 the WISPS Annual Conference celebrates its twentieth anniversary.

When: Friday, November 1 to Saturday, November 2
Where: Maynooth University

WISPS Annual Conference

To mark this important milestone academics and postgraduate students conducting research into Luso-Hispanic Studies will meet at Maynooth University for presenting and discussing a variety of issues such as art, activism, gender, crisis, transnationalism and interculturality.

Guest Speakers

Prof Par Kumaraswami

Par Kumaraswami is Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Reading. She was a founding member of WISPS, being elected its President from 2004-2007. She completed a PhD (2004) in reading women’s testimonial writing from the Cuban Revolution, and her research interests lie in the social functions of literary culture in post-59 Cuba, and particularly in reader reception. She has published extensively in the area of Cuban cultural studies, including her joint-authored book, with Antoni Kapcia, Literary Culture in Cuba: Revolution, Nation-Building and the Book (Manchester University Press, 2012) and her single-authored book The Social Life of Literature in Revolutionary Cuba: Narrative, Identity and Well-being (Palgrave/Macmillan 2016). She is the Principal Investigator for a 5-year Leverhulme Trust research project (2014-2019) based in eastern Cuba about culture, identity, nationhood and globalisation in the Cuban periphery.

Dr Raquel Ribeiro

Raquel Ribeiro (Porto, 1980) is a journalist, writer and a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. She took a BA in Journalism and Communication Sciences at Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), followed by a PhD in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool on the idea of Europe in the works of the Portuguese woman writer Maria Gabriela Llansol. She was the first recipient in the Humanities of the Nottingham Advanced Research Fellowship (2010-2012), at the University of Nottingham, where she developed the postdoctoral project: “War Wounds: Cultural representations of the Cuban presence in the Angolan civil war”. In 2013, she was awarded a Gabriel García Márquez Fellowship in Cultural Journalism at the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), in Colombia, and has been a jury for the Garcia Márquez Ibero-American Journalism Award since 2014. She taught Brazilian Literature at the University of Oxford before joining the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at Edinburgh in 2014, where she teaches Lusophone literatures and cultures. Raquel has also been a permanent arts freelance correspondent and literary critic for the Portuguese newspaper Público since 2001. As a creative writer, she published two novels and several short-stories. She is a member of the Cuba Research Forum (Nottingham).

Postgraduate Bursary Available

Three postgraduate travel bursaries of up to £175 (€195) each will be available and bursary holders will not pay for conference registration.

If you are a postgraduate student and want to apply for one of these travel bursaries, please send a CV, a detailed breakdown of anticipated costs and a short personal statement – indicating why you want to attend WISPS, how this conference will benefit your academic career, and if you are in receipt of funding from another funding body- together with your abstract to WISPSMaynooth2019@gmail.com. If you have already submitted your abstract, please send only the CV, the breakdown of costs and the statement.