Ana Belén Álvarez graduated from “Universidad Internacional de La Rioja” in Spain with a bachelor’s in criminal justice. Afterwards, she earned her master’s degree in Spanish Literature at The University of Alabama. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Romance Languages with a concentration in Spanish literature. She is exploring the representation of child characters who are victims of criminal acts in contemporary peninsular Literature and Cinema between 2010 and 2020. This is the first decade in which there are official records of child victimization in Spain. Specifically, she delves into how society defined ethics are translated into the aesthetics of my selected corpus. The importance of this dissertation is fundamental to fill the void in academia regarding these characters’ agency and space within the novel or film.

Alejandro is a Venezuelan journalist who has worked and written for different media entities, such as El Tiempo, of Bogotá, TalCual, of Caracas, and Diario Las Américas, of Miami.  He is also the author of the book Auge y crisis del IV poder, La prensa en democracia (Rise and Crisis of the 4^th Estate, The Press in Democracy). After working for more than 10 years in newsrooms and experiencing from close up the  meaningful changes that have taken place in his home country and the region as a whole, Alejandro found in literature a special arena to understand Latin American reality. He is pursuing his Ph.D. at the University of Alabama, in order to make connections between journalism and literature in the XXI century.

Russell is a PhD student studying Spanish literature. After graduating from Birmingham-Southern College (BA Spanish, Phi Beta Kappa), he moved to Washington, D.C., where he taught K-12 Spanish at private schools. While there, he also attended George Mason University (MA, Spanish) focusing primarily on the possibilities and challenges of multicultural and heritage language education. A few of his favorite learning and research areas include the Catholic imagination in early modern Spain, the peninsular Protestant Reformation, Federico García Lorca, and heritage language education in the southern US’s rural public schools.

​I am Ph.D. Candidate in Romance Languages specializing in Spanish linguistics. My primary area of study includes sociophonetics—and sociolinguistics more broadly—as it relates to language, gender, and sexuality. My doctoral dissertation, currently in progress, focuses on the sociophonetic variation of LGBTQ+ speakers of Peninsular Spanish. In addition to my doctoral work, I am a coordinator for Spanish 102 sections in the Spanish Basic Language Program at UA. I also teach introductory- and intermediate-level Spanish classes to undergraduates.

Joshua Williams is a PhD student of Spanish Linguistics at The University of Alabama. Josh is passionate about celebrating the interaction of language and culture as his research focuses on the phonology of Spanish language contact in the US South. Outside of his research, you can find him rucking and enjoying the fresh air.