“Portraiture and Power: Women, Nature, and the Erotic in Late 19th-Century Spanish and Hispanophone Art and Literature”

No neat line divides visual art from literature: Artists often paint stories, and authors frequently use visual motifs to imbue their texts with a culture’s expectations—or to dispute those expectations. In so doing, both kinds of makers record and rewrite the world.

Rhi Johnson is a specialist in the modern Hispanophone transatlantic who uses image-in-text and new materialisms to explore the construction of gender and sexuality.

Joy Castro is the award-winning author of the memoir The Truth Book, two literary thrillers set in post-Katrina New Orleans: Hell or High Water and Nearer Home, the essay collection Island of Bones, and the short fiction collection How Winter Began.