Havana Foundation and Legacies
October 6, 2014 - 4:00 pm
Room 9206/07 (The Graduate Center, CUNY)
This Bildner Center Series explores the legacies of Havana since its founding in 1514-1519. Carlos Riobó (City College), Odette Casamayor-Cisneros (University of Connecticut-Storrs), and Hermes Mallea M(Group) focus their discussions on original architecture and literature, ruins, French and Soviet influences in Cuban culture.
Carlos Riobó, City College and Graduate Center, CUNY
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros, University of Connecticut-Storrs
Hermes Mallea, M(Group), New York
Carlos Riobó (Ph.D., Yale University) is Associate Professor of Latin American Literature and Cultures and Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at The City College of New York, CUNY. He is also a Cuba Project Fellow of the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies at CUNY’s Graduate Center. His primary research interests are twentieth-century Cuban and Argentine literature and culture. He has published articles and reviews in major journals on Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, Sigüenza y Góngora, nineteenth-century Argentine literature, Ezra Pound, and Italian and Spanish Medieval Literature. His latest book on Cuba, Cuban Intersections of Literary and Urban Spaces, was published in 2011 by SUNY Press.
Odette Casamayor-Cisneros (Ph.D., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France) is Associate Professor of Latin American, Carribean and Latino Literatures and Cultures at The University of Connecticut-Storrs. Her areas of expertise include twentieth-century and contemporary Caribbean, Latin American and Latino literatures, cultures & societies. Focusing on contemporary Cuba, her research projects are structured around two main subjects: Post-soviet Cuban culture and cultural expressions of blackness since the triumph of the socialist revolution in 1959 to the present. She is currently working on a new book, On Being Black: Racial Self-Identification Processes in Post-Soviet Cuban Cultural Production.
Hermes Mallea is an architect and a partner in the New York City based firm M(Group) and a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Mr. Mallea studied at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture and Columbia University’s graduate school of Historic Preservation. A longtime collector of vintage Cuban photographs, Mr. Mallea has travelled to Cuba frequently to do research and to lecture on historic preservation. His latest book, Great Houses of Havana, was published by Monacelli Press in 2011.
