Spotlight on Our Members

   Publish a book recently?  An article or book chapter?  Curate an exhibit, give a live performance, or secure an external grant to help fund your ongoing scholarly work?  This page serves as a place to showcase the recent professional activities & accomplishments of our members.  If you have something to contribute, let us know!

MACLAS member Fernando G. Herrero (Ph.D. Duke University), currently Visiting Research Scholar at the Instituto de Iberoamérica, University of Salamanca, Spain, has just published a collection of essays, The (Latin) American Scene, Present and Future (Im-)Perfect: Five Critical Conversations (Anthem Press, 2025). Sandwiched between the volume's prologue and epilogue are meaty five chapters, each offering an extensive interview with a towering figure in Latin American studies: Walter D. Mignolo, John Beverley, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa and Roberto González Echevarría.

Among other knotty issues, “the conversations address academic agendas and university life dilemmas in the vicinity of the signs ‘Latin’ and ‘Hispanic’ in the United States, [as well as] Spanish / English relations, literature and culture, history and theory.” The volume is also available as an e-book. For more information, visit https://anthempress.com/the-latin-american-scene-present-and-future-im-perfect-hb For a full listing of Prof. Herrero’s published works, visit his website, at https://www.fernandogherrero.com/

Former MACLAS President Bridget Maria Chesterton, Professor of History at Buffalo State University, recently published her latest book, El Cuaderno de Etele Piacentini: Asistente de Josefina Velilla de Aquino (Asunción, Paraguay: CEADUO), 2024. Her most recent journal article, “Modernity, Migration, and Defeat: The Brazilian Gaze in Noites Paraguayas during the Era of Alfredo Stroessner,” co-authored with Pedro Martins Mallmann, was published in April 2025 in Latin and Latinx Visual Culture 7 no, 2: 41-54.

From the publisher's promotional blurb of El Cuaderno de Etele Piacentini: "Leer este libro no es solo aprender cómo se cocinaba en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, es además conocer acerca de los cambios en el consumo de la época, cómo las influencias políticas y económicas afectan a nuestra cultura y a algo aparentemente tan privado como la cocina. Es también hacer un viaje en el tiempo para entrar en la cocina con Chichita y probar cada una de sus recetas. Aprendí a apreciar el horno volcán de la cocina de mi mamá, y mirar con otros ojos los pyrex, el polvo royal y la maicena. Sin dudas, un rescate histórico y antropológico culinario, que invita al mismo tiempo a a quien lee, a experimentar en la cocina."