Repeating Islands

Born in Manhattan and raised in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, Ivette Romero-Cesareo has always considered herself to be an islander. Her interest in exploring her family’s diverse Caribbean and trans-Atlantic roots, led her to reroute the path of her doctoral studies in French literature (at Cornell University) towards a comparative exploration of Caribbean literatures and cultures. She is professor of Spanish and Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Marist College, where she teaches Latin American literature, cultures, and cinema. Her research interests include Caribbean testimonial narrative, women’s studies, and visual arts. Her work has been published in journals such as Anales del Caribe, Callaloo, Mango Season, Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, and Sargasso. She has co-edited two volumes with Lisa Paravisini-Gebert, Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001) and Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures (2008). Currently, she is writing a book on aesthetic responses to AIDS in the Caribbean.

Lisa Paravisini-Gebert works in the fields of literature and cultural studies, specializing in the multidisciplinary, comparative study of the Caribbean. Growing up in her native Puerto Rico, she became fascinated by the many cultural connections between Caribbean peoples despite our different histories and languages and has made that the subject of her research and teaching. She is based in the Hispanic Studies Department at Vassar College, where she is holds the Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair, and from 2009 to 2011 will direct the Environmental Studies Program. She is also a participating faculty member in the Programs in Latin American Studies, International Studies, and Women’s Studies at Vassar. She is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (2003, with Margarite Fernández Olmos), and most recently, Literatures of the Caribbean (2008).

Lisa has co-edited a number of collections of essays, most notably Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean (1997) and Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse (2001). Her most recent edited volume, Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures, has just been published by the University Press of Florida. Her critical editions of texts by Caribbean women writers include Phyllis Allfrey’s The Orchid House (1997) and It Falls Into Place: The Short Stories of Phyllis Shand Allfrey (2004). Her articles and literary translations have appeared in Callaloo, the Journal of West Indian Literature, the Jean Rhys Review, the Journal of Caribbean Literature, Obsidian, NWIG, Research in African Literatures and the Revista Mexicana del Caribe, among others.