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.

Dr. Fuster’s research examines the contextual factors influencing food practices and the policies and interventions implemented to improve them. This work applies a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach to examine underlying social determinants of diet-related health inequities, with a focus on Latin American communities and its diaspora communities. Her community-based research experience has sought to address diet-related disparities, aiming to shift emphasis to upstream approaches that engage the structural factors that underlie access to healthy food and high-quality healthcare. This was the subject of her first book, Caribeños at the Table: How Migration, Health, and Race Intersect in New York City. Building on this work, Dr. Fuster’s is currently tackling food access issues via the Latin American Restaurants in Action (LARiA) Project, supported by an NIH/NHLBI Career Development (K01) Award. The LARiA Project applies systems science, design thinking, and implementation sciences to engage Latin restaurants in designing and implementing innovations to facilitate healthier eating. Additionally, she also engages in research examining nutrition expert perceptions and practice, and food policy implementation. She completed her Ph.D. in Food Policy and Applied Nutrition at the Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, and a post-doctoral fellowship in food studies at New York University. Before joining the faculty at Tulane, she was an Assistant Professor at the City University of New York Brooklyn College.

Jane T. Bertrand, PhD, MBA, is a professor, jointly appointed in the Departments of Health Policy & Management and International Health & Sustainable Development. She also holds the Neal A. and Mary Vanselow endowed chair. Her work has involved program evaluation and behavior change communication in the areas of international family planning and HIV prevention. Dr. Bertrand has been on the Tulane faculty since 1979, except for the period from 2002-09 when she directed the Center for Communication Programs (CCP), at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her published research focuses on Sub-Saharan and Latin America. In recent years she has worked primarily on the implementation and evaluation of family planning programs to increase contraceptive use in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At Tulane she teaches one graduate level course: International Family Planning: Policies and Programs. Also, she serves as faculty adviser for Global Scholars. She is fluent in French and Spanish.

Barbara E. Mundy’s scholarship dwells in zones of contact between Native peoples and settler colonists as they forged new visual cultures in the Americas. She has been particularly interested in the social construction of space and its imaginary, which was the subject of her first book, The Mapping of New Spain. Her most recent book, The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City, draws on Indigenous texts and representations to counter a colonialist historiography and to argue for the city’s nature as an Indigenous city through the sixteenth century.

In the coming academic year (2021-22), Mundy will hold the Kislak Chair at the Library of Congress where she will be working on a book project, "The Embodiment of the Word: European Book Culture and New World Manuscripts." Rather than considering Indigenous manuscripts as phenomena separate from European books, the new work situates native bookmakers in the midst of the new technological revolution brought about by the printing press. While Martin Luther’s innovations (and conflagrations) take up most of the oxygen in the history of print in the early sixteenth century, attracting less attention, but equally radical, was the Spanish crown’s use of the new technology to control, via standardization, governance, language, and history. The testing ground of this imperial project was the “Indies,” as their American territories were called, and it is within this context that her protagonists--Indigenous writers, painters and bookmakers-- operated.

With Dana Leibsohn, Mundy is the co-creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. Digital projects are a fundamental part of her teaching practice. Mundy serves as a Senior Fellow of Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, on the editorial boards of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture and Estudios de cultura náhuatl. She is the incoming president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. Prior to coming to Tulane, she was a Professor of Art History at Fordham University in New York.