Tatiana McInnis earned her BA in English from Florida International University in 2012 and her MA in English from Vanderbilt University in 2013. She is currently a PhD candidate in the English Department at Vanderbilt University and anticipates completing her degree in 2017. Her research interests include Exile, Caribbean, and Southern Studies in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature. Her current research project will tentatively be titled Missing Miami: Rethinking Region, Nation, and Diversity in the US and will explore Miami’s important role as a destination point for immigrants and exiles from the Caribbean and the resulting transformation of the city in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo
(Chair, Program in American Studies, Vanderbilt University; Founding Director, Voices from Our America) specializes in the intersections between US African American, Caribbean, and Afro-Latin American lives, literatures, and expressive cultures. Awarded fellowships from Ford, DeWitt-Wallace, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundations. Author of Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. Editor of African Routes, Caribbean Roots, Latino Lives (a special issue of Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies). Coeditor of Rhythms of the Afro-Atlantic World. Nwankwo is committed to US students grasping the realities of the many cultured worlds within and beyond the United States, and engaging in hands-on, eyes-on, and ears-on learning via living primary sources.