Crossing Borders/Breaking Boundaries

Pre- and Post-Encounter Arts of the Early Americas

June 22 – 29, 2009

Faculty Biographies

Bauer | Camus | Cohen | Cypess | DeLeonardis | Krakaur | Populoh
Tenenbaum

Printable copy of biographies

Ralph Bauer
Literature of the conquest / travel narratives

Ralph Bauer is an associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has published The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: empire, travel, modernity (Cambridge UP, 2003/2008), An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru, by Titu Cusi Yupanqui, trans., annotated, and introduced by Ralph Bauer (Colorado UP, 2006), and the co-edited collection (with José Antonio Mazzotti) Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: empires, texts, identities (UNCP, 2009), as well as of numerous articles on colonial British and Spanish American literature.

Renée Camus
Early American Dance

Renée Camus is Founder and Artistic Director of Centuries Historical Dance. She earned a Master of Arts degree in dance from American University with her lecture/performance, What Goes Around, Comes Around, comparing the Cancan and the Charleston. She also holds a B.F.A. in Musical Theatre from the University of Michigan. She is a member of the Ballroom Dance Company and teaches swing at Joy of Motion. She is also a lecturer in tap at American University in Washington, D.C., and at Montgomery College in Rockville. She has performed with companies such as the Commonwealth Vintage Dancers, Footworks Percussive Dance Ensemble, and toured with the show Dancing on Common Ground. She currently performs with Tappening, a rhythm tap ensemble; PedAntics, a clogging group; and the Culkin Adults Irish Dancers. She has worked with research materials and documentation at the Dance Heritage Coalition and the Library of Congress.

Renée began her studies at age 5 with ballet, jazz, and tap dancing, and eventually became involved with folk and country dances, including morris, sword, and English and Appalachian clogging. Renée has also studied Renaissance and Baroque dance, and has extensive experience in nineteenth and early twentieth century social dances, such as the Waltz, Polka, One-step, Fox-trot, Tango, Lindy Hop, Shim-Sham, and West Coast Swing.

Thomas Cohen
The Missionary Church in the Portuguese Empire, 1450-1800

Dr. Thomas Cohen is curator of the Oliveira Lima Library and associate professor of history at The Catholic University of America. He earned his Ph.D. in 1990 at Stanford University. He is the author of The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal (Stanford University Press, 1998) and is currently working on a book about Jesuits, Jews, and New Christians in the early modern world.

Sandra Messinger Cypess
Representations of La Malinche

Sandra Messinger Cypess is currently Professor of Latin American Literature and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, whose faculty she joined in 1994 after having been at SUNY Binghamton University since 1976. Professor Cypess received her B.A. at Brooklyn College, majoring in Spanish and French. Her MA was awarded from Cornell and her PhD from the University of Illinois. Her research deals primarily with women writers, the representation of Women in Latin American Literature, and Latin American theatre. Her theoretic focus centers on feminist theory and semiotics. Motivated by her doctoral work with Don Luis Leal at the University of Illinois, she has published extensively on writers from Mexico (Villaurrutia, Carballido, Garro, Castellanos, Berman). Her book, La Malinche in Mexican Literature: from History to Myth (U Texas Press 1991), was completed after being in Mexico under the auspices of an NEH summer fellowship, and is considered one of the major pieces of scholarship on that figure. Editor of three additional books on various topics, she is also co-editor with Mario Rojas of the Drama section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies. She was invited to write the chapter on Twentieth Century Latin American theatre for the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature. Professor Cypess also appears in the documentary, "Indigenous Always: The Story of La Malinche and the Conquest of Mexico,” an award-winning documentary that was broadcast on national television through PBS.

Lisa DeLeonardis
Visual Aesthetics and Enduring Legacies: Art of the Ancient Americas

Lisa DeLeonardis is the Austen-Stokes Professor in Art of the Ancient Americas in the Department of the History of Art at the Johns Hopkins University. At Johns Hopkins she developed the Americas core curriculum and currently serves on the Board of Latin American Studies. For five years she was Associate Curator of Pre-Columbian art at the Baltimore Museum of Art where she designed a reinstallation plan for the Americas collection. She has also served as consultant to the Walters Art Museum and has trained docents in both institutions. Since 1989 she has been active with the Museo Regional in Ica, Peru and has conducted a number of archaeological projects in the Ica Valley and surrounding area. Her research focuses on the art and archaeology of Paracas and Nasca and has been published in Latin American Antiquity (2000), Andean Archaeology (2004), and Andean Past (2005). Prior to her post at Hopkins she coordinated the Guide to Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530-1900 (Pillsbury, ed., 2008) at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and contributed six essays on Colonial and Independence Period writers and artists. This work and an article on Baroque visual arts for A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture (Castro-Klarén, ed., 2008) inspired her current project at Santa Cruz de Lancha, where she plans excavations in the near future. She is currently a summer fellow in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.

Linda Krakaur
Facilitator; Interactive Workshop Dramatizing the Conquest

For more than twenty years, Linda Krakaur has worked as a teacher in local public schools, most recently at a performing arts charter school in the District of Columbia. After graduating from the International School for Drama in Education in Dublin, Linda began working at the Arts Integration Institute at Towson University. She is currently a faculty member with George Mason University's Initiatives in Educational Transformation, teaching graduate courses in Urban Education and Arts Integration.

Valeska Populoh
Travelogues: An Artful Journey through Bookmaking and Maps

Valeska Populoh is a performer, artist and educator living in Baltimore, MD. Valeska currently teaches in the Fiber Department at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She also works as an associate artist with a variety of community arts organizations, including Black Cherry Puppet Theater, Kids on the Hill, Art on Purpose, and Nanaprojects. She founded the Cause Company, a performance troupe, in 2004 and collaborates with other artists on performance projects from vaudeville-style stage acts to stiltwalking spectacles. Valeska's studio work revolves around visual storytelling, encompassing a variety of media, including illustration, photography, sculpture, costuming and puppetry.

Barbara A. Tenenbaum
Keynote Address: The Hispanic History of the United States

Barbara A. Tenenbaum is the Specialist in Mexican Culture in the Hispanic Division at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Dr. Tenenbaum is curator of the Library of Congress exhibition, “Exploring the Early Americas.”

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Sponsored by the the Maryland Humanities Council
and the Center for Renaissance & Baroque Studies