Our aims:
AILASA was established in 1993 with several aims, including:
To promote research into and the teaching of Iberian and Latin American Studies in Australasia;
to promote the professional development of its members;
to promote public awareness of and interest in the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America;
to stimulate and encourage interchange between Australasia and the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America; and
to coordinate and rationalise available resources among member institutions through the interchange of students, teachers and resources.
OUR EXECUTIVE
President:
Dr. Fabricio Tocco is an Argentine-Brazilian researcher and educator. He is the Convenor of Spanish Studies in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, at the ANU. His research deals with how genre fiction informs and is informed by literary and political theory in Latin American studies. His first book, Latin American Detectives Against Power (Lexington, 2022), was awarded the ICFA Book Prize. His forthcoming book, Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller (University of Texas Press, 2025), was adapted to the documentary film Secretos Precarios, that will be available on SBS on Demand starting in November 2025. He is also the author of Parece diciembre (Equidistancias, 2025), a coming-of-age novel set against a backdrop of political turmoil.
Secretary:
Dr Thomas Nulley-Valdés is Lecturer in Spanish Studies in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the ANU. Thomas is an emerging scholar of World Literature with a focus on Spanish and Latin American literatures of the 20th and 21st Centuries. His first book, McOndo Revisited, was published with Lexington in 2023. He is currently preparing an edited volume with Juan Poblete (UC Santa Cruz) titled Chilean Literature as World Literature: 1990-2025.
Treasurer:
Dr karo moret miranda is an Afro-Cuban historian, an early research academic and a Lecturer in History at the ANU, specialising in African studies and African diaspora studies, focusing on race, religion, and gender issues. She is also interested in the influence and borrowings of African and Afro-Caribbean culture on Western thought and culture, and vice versa. She is interested in establishing conversations between text and image about the body, detecting the synaesthesia between how the body is represented and how it is narrated/called/described. In addition to publishing articles and academic chapters as well as working on her thesis book, she continues to collaborate with European institutions and museums.
Membership Secretary:
Dr Manuel Delicado Cantero is a Senior Lecturer of Spanish and Hispanic Linguistics, at the ANU. He is the author of Prepositional Clauses in Spanish: A Diachronic and Comparative Syntactic Study, (De Gruyter, 2013) and Noun-Based Constructions in the History of Portuguese and Spanish (co-authored with Patricia Amaral, published by Oxford University Press, 2021)
HDR Representative:
Jéssica Andrade Tolentino is a PhD Candidate, at the ANU. She holds a Master’s degree in Children’s Literature, Media and Culture from the University of Glasgow. In 2019, she coedited the book Literatura Infantil: Campo, Materialidade e Produção (Moinhos). She is cofounder of "Colectivo La Lucila," an interdisciplinary group dedicated to the study of children’s literature and media in Latin America.
Undergraduate Representative and Social Media Officer:
Marcos Penteado is an undergraduate student at the ANU.
Past President 2020 - 2024
Associate Professor Robert Mason
Robert Mason is the former President of AILASA, and a public historian and museum studies scholar interested in the history of coloniality and mobility in Australia and the Asia-Pacific. His research explores intercultural memory and heritage in the entangled Spanish, Portuguese, and British histories of Australia, Asia and the Americas. Robert is the author of more than 40 journal articles and book chapters, four edited collections and a monograph. Robert has supervised more than 20 HDR candidates to completion. Recently, he was the 2019 Mendel Fellow in Latin American History at the University of Indiana Bloomington. He is Co-Chair of the Australian chapter of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.
How AILASA is governed
AILASA holds a Biennial General Meeting at which members participate in setting policy and regulations. In between meetings, the organization is run by the Executive Committee (the President, Secretary and Treasurer), elected by full members of AILASA for a two-year term. See also the AILASA Constitution as amended on 12 August 1999).