Vicente Lecuna chairs the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at John Jay. From 1997 to 2019, he was a professor in the Literature Department at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He has held visiting professorships at Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University, Rice University and the Universidad de los Andes. Lecuna’s research explores the intersections of populism, violence, urban design and contemporary fiction in Latin American cities, with particular attention to Caracas. His work appears in Cuadernos de Literatura, Revista de Investigaciones Literarias, Revista Estudios, Revista Iberoamericana and Voz y Escritura.
In his recent book, A Promising Past: Remodeling Fictions in Parque Central, Caracas (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025), Lecuna examines the cultural fictions surrounding an emblematic multipurpose complex built in downtown Caracas in the 1970s.
Irina R. Troconis is an assistant professor of Latin American Studies in the Romance Studies
Department at Cornell University. Her research explores the relationship between memory,
politics, and cultural production in contemporary Latin America, with a specific focus on
Venezuela. She is the co-editor of Deborah Castillo: Radical Disobedience (HemiPress, 2019)
and the co-organizer of the conversation series “Re-thinking Venezuela.” Her work has appeared in Latin American Research Review, Latin American Literary Review, Comparative Literature Studies, Revista Iberoamericana and The Journal of Media Art Study and Theory, among others.
Her first book, The Necromantic State: Spectral Remains in the Afterglow of Venezuela’s
Bolivarian Revolution (Duke UP, 2025) explores through the lens of spectrality the memory
narratives and practices developed around the figure of Hugo Chávez in the decade following his death. Her second book project focuses on the relationship between identity, materiality, and the gaze in poetic and artistic works emerging from and about the Venezuelan diaspora.
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Questions? Please email Remy Bahati at rbahati@jjay.cuny.edu.
