Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez (BA, University of Puerto Rico, PhD, University of California at Berkeley, 1998) Born in Hato Rey, Puerto Rico, in 1967, Arroyo-Martínez is a literary and cultural studies scholar who specializes in Afro-Diasporic literatures and cultures in the Americas, queer studies, critical race theory, colonial and post-colonial theory in Latin America and the Caribbean. She is the author of Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil'Italic text (Pittsburgh: Iberoamericana, 2003) a critique of cultural racism in the work of Gilberto Freyre (Brasil) and Fernando Ortiz (Cuba) and several Cuban and Brazilian novels, and Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (Palgrave, 2013), an analysis of transnational, racial and colonial dimensions of Masonic encounters in the circum-Caribbean and the United States (1850-1898). She has authored a great number of essays on Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and Caribbean Literatures, U.S. Latina/o Studies, and Afro-Latina/o Studies. She has published at Encuentro de la cultura cubana, La Habana Elegante, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Journal of Latino Studies, among many other national and international publications. She has also contributed articles to Cruce, 80 grados, Huffington Post-Black Voices among many public journals and magazines. Her new research project entitled Mediascapes is an analysis of local and transnational Caribbean cultures in new media and their ways of representing race, ethnicity and culture in neoliberal times. She has been the recipient of awards from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She is also affiliated to the Department of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas, Austin.