• Dissertation Title: A través del caleidoscopio: identidad y localización cultural en textos autobiográfico hispanos en los Estados Unidos.

• Supervisory Committee:
  • Professor Oscar Montero, Chair
  • Professor Isaías Lerner
  • Professor Susana Reisz

• email: ilopez@ramapo.edu; LunaMaga@aol.com

Dr. López is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the School of American and International Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, where she teaches all levels of Spanish, literature, and methodology of foreign language teaching. She is the author of La autobiografía hispana contemporánea en los Estados Unidos: a través del caleidoscopio (Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), a study of transnational and border identities and their intersection with gender, race, and class in U.S. Latino/a autobiographical narratives. She is co-author of the textbook Cofre literario: Iniciación a la literatura hispánica (McGraw-Hill, 2003), designed to introduce beginning students of Spanish to Hispanic literature.

Her scholarly work has appeared in Cuban Studies/Estudios cubanos, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Anales del Caribe, Hispanic Review, and Revista/Review Interamericana, among other journals. A more recent article on Cuban-American cultural journals since the 1960s is forthcoming in the Revista Iberoamericana. Currently she is conducting research on the themes of travel and return, and the representation of exile and the émigré community in Cuban arts and literature. Among her research interests are 20th century Latin American fiction and testimonial literature, Caribbean literature, Latino/a literature in the context of the Americas, second-language acquisition, and gender studies.

Professor López has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship, a Latino Studies Section Research and Dissertation Award of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), a PSC-CUNY Research Award, and a grant from the Ford Foundation. [text source: Ramapo College; photo: Cuba Literaria.]