Education

Ph.D., Romance Languages, University of Miami, 2007.

M.Phil., Latin American Literature, University of Havana, 1995.

Bio

María Isabel Alfonso is a Professor of Spanish. Her research focusses on the interceptions between aesthetics and politics in Cuba and the Caribbean. Her book, Ediciones El Puente y los vacíos del canon literario cubano: dinámicas culturales posrevolucionarias (Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico 2016) provides an inside look into Cuba's cultural and political dynamics in the context of the sixties. 

Professor Alfonso teaches general courses on Latin America and Spanish literature, culture and film, and intermediate and advanced language classes. Her specialty courses include Cuban Revolution: The Reinvention of a Dream, Cuba and Nicaragua, The Making and Unmaking of Revolutions, Social Movements in Latin America, and Deconstructing the Caribbean.

Dr. Alfonso serves on the university’s Distance Education Committee. 

Alfonso is the director of the documentary Rethinking Cuban Civil Society, which explores issues of human rights in contemporary Cuba and is part of the academic distributor Icarus Films’ catalog.  

Her upcoming publication, Antagonías de una exclusion - Ediciones El Puente y los vacíos del canon literario cubano (Almenara 2024), is a revised version of her previous monograph about El Puente. 

Select Publications

“Ediciones El Puente y los vacíos del canon: hacia una nueva poética del compromiso.” En: Ediciones El Puente en la Habana de los años 60. Lecturas críticas y libros de poesía. Jesús J. Barquet, ed. Chihuahua: Ediciones del Azar, 2011.

“Radical Poetics of the Sixties in Cuba: The Case of Ediciones El Puente and Its Revolutionary Existentialism.” Public 52: Havana (Fall 2015): 203-216.

Book Presentation: Ediciones El Puente and the Gaps of the Cuban Literary Canon - Post-revolutionary cultural dynamics. 

Primera y Segunda Novísima de Poesía Cubana. Edición Fascimilar. Libri Prohibit 2023.

InCubadora Ediciones.

Quote

“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”

“Obviously,” replied Don Quixote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”

― Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote