Queer Hispanisms now

Speaker biographies

Paul Julian Smith

Paul Julian Smith is an internationally recognized critic in Hispanic cultural studies and critical theory. He has been Visiting Professor in 10 universities including Stanford, NYU and Carlos III, Madrid and has given over 100 lectures and invited papers around the world. His books have been translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish. Elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2008, his interests are wide-ranging and interdisciplinary. His Writing in the Margin (Oxford University Press, 1988) was the first systematic application of poststructuralist critical theory to literature of the Spanish Golden Age, and The Moderns: Time, Space, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Oxford University Press, 2000) was a ground-breaking examination of Spanish urban space. As the Spanish film critic for the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine, Smith wrote dozens of reviews and, as the author of Desire Unlimited: The Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar (Verso, 1994, 2000 and 2014), earned a reputation as the major world scholar on the films of the Spanish director. Smith went beyond the field of cinema in Contemporary Spanish Culture: TV, Fashion, Art, and Film (Polity, 2003) to examine cultural areas that receive less academic attention; and his 2007 work Spanish Visual Culture: Cinema, Television, Internet (Manchester University Press) explores emotion, location, and nostalgia in each of these media. Smith’s research also focuses on Mexico, including a book on the film Amores Perros (BFI, 2003). He was a juror at the Morelia Film Festival in Mexico in 2009 and at the San Sebastián International Film Festival in 2013, was a regular contributor to Film Quarterly, and is one of the founding editors of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.

Juana María Rodríguez

Juana María Rodríguez is a cultural critic, public speaker, and award-winning author who writes about sexual cultures, racial politics, and the many tangled expressions of Latina identity. A Professor of Ethnic Studies; Gender and Women’s Studies, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley, she is the author of the newly published Puta Life: Seeing Latinas, Working Sex (Duke UP 2023);  Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press 2014) which won the Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize at the Modern Language Association and was a Lambda Literary Foundation Finalist for LGBT Studies; and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (NYU Press, 2003). She also served as a co-editor of the special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on “Trans Studies en las Americas.” Her work has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Greek. In 2023,  Dr. Rodríguez was honored by The Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies’ with the prestigious Kessler Award, in recognition of her significant lifelong contributions to the field of LGBT Studies.