Maile Speakman studied the emergence of United States queer theory in Havana in the early 2000s. Her research interests included queer and feminist cultural production in contemporary Cuba, U.S. Empire, borderlands and contact zones, intellectual history and social theory, queer geographies, and the production of urban space. Maile received a Tinker Foundation grant to conduct ethnographic and archival research in Havana for her Master's thesis, which she successfully defended in the Spring of 2016, thus earning her M.A. degree in Latin American Studies in May 2016.
