Igor Acácio is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tulane University’s Center for Inter-American Policy and Research (CIPR). He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Riverside. He is interested in the study of democracy and civil-military relations, and defense and security issues, with a geographical focus on Latin America. His recent work has been published in outlets such as Comparative Politics, Democratization, the Journal of Democracy, Armed Forces and Society, and Public Opinion Quarterly. His research has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), and the Getúlio Vargas Foundation.

Ana María Ochoa is a professor in the Newcomb Department of Music, the Department of Communication and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her work is on histories of listening and the decolonial, on sound studies and climate change, and on the relationship between the creative industries, the literary and the sonic in Latin America and the Caribbean. Her current projects explore the bioacoustics of life and death in colonial histories of the Americas and the relationship between sound, climate change and the colonial. She has been a Distinguished Greenleaf Scholar in Residence at Tulane University (2016) and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-2008). She has served on the advisory boards of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. Her book, Aurality, Listening and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Colombia (Duke University Press, 2014) was awarded the Alan Merriam Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology. She is also the author of Músicas locales en tiempos de globalización (Buenos Aires: Norma 2003) and Entre los Deseos y los Derechos: Un Ensayo Crítico sobre Políticas Culturales (Bogotá: Ministerio de cultura, 2003) and numerous articles in Spanish and English.

Cheryl Narumi Naruse (nah-roo-seh) is an Assistant Professor of English and the Mellon Assistant Professor of the Humanities at Tulane University. Her research and teaching interests include contemporary Anglophone literatures and cultures (particularly those from Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands), diasporic Asian and Asian American literature, postcolonial theory, cultures of capitalism, and genre studies. Recent courses she has taught include “Literatures of Tourism,” “Race, Empires, and Asian America,” “Asian Diasporic Literature,” “Love and Capitalism,” “Postcolonial and Diasporic Southeast Asian Literature,” “Literary Investigations,” and “Postcolonial Theory.” In 2022, she was awarded a Faculty Appreciation Award by the Graduate Studies Student Association for excellence in mentoring and teaching. 

Naruse’s first book, tentatively titled Global Asia and Its National Cultures: Genre and Postcolonial Capitalism in Singapore, theorizes Singapore's transpacific cultures of capitalism using the tools of literary and cultural criticism and demonstrates the ongoing significance of postcolonial nationalism in our current economic moment. The book moreover demonstrates how studying economically exceptional “Asian Tiger” sites like Singapore are crucial for comprehending constructions of global inequality and offers an expanded, contemporary vision for postcolonial theory. Other current projects include Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Singapore, a collection she is co-editing with Joanne Leow and Alfian Sa'at, and a second monograph, Editing Between Empires: Critical Regionalism and Anglophone Literatures of Southeast Asia, which examines the curative role of editors in producing the literary, regional imagination of Southeast Asia from the post-1945 decolonization era to the present. 

Naruse’s publications include articles in biography, Genre, and Verge: Studies in Global Asias as well as chapters in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics and Singapore Literature and Culture: Current Directions in Local and Global Contexts. She has also co-edited a number of special issues: "Literature and Postcolonial Capitalism" for ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature; a Periscope dossier “Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics and Alternative Globalities” for Social Text Online; and "Singapore at 50: At the Intersections of Neoliberal Globalization and Postcoloniality" for Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. 

Naruse earned her Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, with a certificate in International Cultural Studies from the East-West Center. Her research has been supported by a postdoctoral fellowship with the Global Asia research cluster at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2015-16). For the MLA, Naruse served as the inaugural chair of the Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Diasporic Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies Forum (2018-19). As former chair of the MLA Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee (2018-19), she led the Delegate Assembly through a discussion on power differentials in graduate education. Naruse also serves as a consultant reader for ARIEL and as the Southeast Asia section editor for Oxford's Year's Work in English Studies. 

Dr. LaVeist's research and writing has focused on three broad thematic research questions: 1) What are the social and behavioral factors that predict the timing of various related health outcomes (e.g. access and utilization of health services, mortality, entrance into nursing home?); 2) What are the social and behavioral factors that explain race differences in health outcomes?; and 3) What has been the impact of social policy on the health and quality of life of African Americans? His work includes both qualitative and quantitative analysis. LaVeist seeks to develop an orienting framework in the development of policy and interventions to address race disparities in health-related outcomes. Specific areas of expertise include: U.S. health and social policy, the role of race in health research, social factors contributing to mortality, longevity and life expectancy, quantitative and demographic analysis and access, and utilization of health services.