The 2025 MLA Annual Convention was held from 9 to 12 January in New Orleans. Read about the presidential theme, Visibility. SPO faculty and students presented sessions in conversation with the presidential theme considering practices of visibility and power (especially surfacing what is hidden); the relation of visibility to meaning; the interaction of social, political, and cultural dimensions of visibility; visual and material culture and languages and literatures; academic visibility; visibility and place and displacement; visibility and privacy; visibility and performance studies; visibility and disability studies; the limits of vision; archival and preservation practices; revisionist histories; rewriting dominant narratives; clarity as concept; marginalized literatures, histories, peoples, languages, and cultures; book bans and censorship; historicized humanities; disrupted binaries or disrupted certainty; un/masking practices; little-known documents, scholars, and literary histories; and more. Check links below for presentation details listed on the MLA online program.
SPO presentations:
Faculty
Natalia Castro Picon: Illicit Repertoires: Transgression around the Modern and Contemporary Iberian Archive
Marina Brownlee: Journalism, Literature, and the Senses in Early Modern Iberia
Luana Reis: Poetry, Translation, and the Afro-Caribbean Cultural Legacy of New Orleans
Grad Students
Oriele Benavides: Writing the Antiauthoritarian Body: A Conference on Feminine Literature (Chile, 1987)
Yangyou Fang: Unacknowledged Resistance: Chinese Authorships and Aesthetics in the Spanish Philippines
You-Jin Kim: Traversing the Spanish Pacific: Navigation for Agency of a Scandalous Spanish Mestiza
Dylan Blau Edelstein: Private or Invisible? Patient Art and Brazilian Diplomacy at a Swiss Ethnographic Museum
Ashford King: Transculturated Spiritual Performance in Eighteenth-Century Louisiana: New Iberia’s First Ascension Day
Renee Congdon: Reimagining Tradition in Galicia/Iberia
Rodney Lebrón-Rivera: El diario en tiempo revolucionario: Rostros del reverso de Lorenzo García Vega
