Havana Foundation and Legacies

October 6, 2014 - 4:00 PM

 
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

About the speakers:

riobo-pic1-300x200Car­los 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.

CasamayorCisneros_5474Odette 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.

Screen shot 2013-01-02 at 12.13.10 PMHermes 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.