On April 8, Rubens Riol, a second-year Ph.D. student at SPO, presented his paper "The Excesses of the Neighbor: Invasion of Personal Space and Forced Togetherness in 'La carne de René' by Virgilio Piñera" at Betwixt and Between: Questions of the Liminal, a conference organized by graduate students in the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Johns Hopkins University.

In the talk, Riol analyzed the representation of bodily interactions in Piñera's novel from a crowd study and queer theory perspective, emphasizing the skin as both a natural limit and a cultural frontier, and René himself as a threshold personae.