Keynote Speaker: Lois Zamora

Lois Parkinson Zamora is a professor of English, History, and Art at the University of Houston. Her research is exemplary in terms of interdisciplinarity. Her work, in fact, builds bridges across the Americas and across genres, which makes her a leader in the comparative study of literature of the Americas. Her research addresses transcultural issues of memory and representation and the intersections of media and genre as they appear in Magical Realism, Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction, The New World Baroque in Art and Literature, and Mexican Literature and Culture.

Her many publications include Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S and Latin American Fiction (Cambridge UP, 1989), Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America l866-1994 (U of Texas P, 1998), and The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (Cambridge UP, 1997), and she co-edited with Wendy B. Faris Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (Duke UP, 1995). Her most recent book, The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (University of Chicago Press, 2006), is a comparative study of New World Baroque art, architecture and literature. This book was awarded The Harry Levin Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association for the best book in comparative literary studies published during 2006 and 2007. Her current project is entitled Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Co-edited with Professor Monika Kaup from the English and Comparative Literature Departments at the University of Washington, the book is a collection of historical and contemporary essays on the European Baroque and its ramifications in Latin America and other post-colonial contexts.

For more information on Prof. Zamora, view her faculty profile.

April 9, 2008