Silvina Schammah Gesser Author & Editor

Eugenia Afinoguénova is Association of Marquette University Women (AMUW) Professor of Spanish Language and Culture at Marquette University. Her most recent monograph is The Prado: Spanish Culture and Leisure, 1819–1939 (2018, winner of the 2019 Eleanor Tufts Award from the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies). She also coedited, with Lara Anderson and Rebecca Ingram, Digestible Governance: Gastrocracy and Spanish Foodways (2024). Afinoguénova’s work has been featured in the catalogues of Milwaukee Art Museum, as well as the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Musée National Pablo Picasso in Paris. Robert Lubar Messeri is currently the Joan Miró Curator at the Museu Serralves, Porto, and a Trustee of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. He was a member of the faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University from 1990 to 2025. His appointments also include Director of NYU Madrid (2014-2019) and visiting professorships at the Universitat de Girona and the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Premi Espais and a fellowship from the American Philosophical Society. A specialist in modern European art, with particular research interests in the Spanish, French and Catalan avant-gardes, he recently curated 'Painting/Poetry: Livres d'artiste by Joan Miró' for the Museu Serralves and is now preparing a major exhibition of Miró’s paintings on Masonite for the Museu Serralves and the Fundació Joan Miró. Silvina Schammah Gesser is a member of the Salti Institute of the Study of Ladino at Bar Ilan University and a researcher at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. She specializes in early 20th-century Spanish history and culture, with a focus on the political discourse of the avant–garde, as well as the recovery of the cultural legacy of the Second Spanish Republic in democratic Spain. Her interests include memory, migration, and exile in Spain and Argentina, as well as the return of the Jewish presence in Iberia. Her publications include Jewish (In)Visibility in Iberia: A View from the Margins, in Contemporary Jewry (2021), her study on the Converso traits in Spanish Baroque and the figure of Teresa of Ávila appearing in Religions, and her articles published by Brill and Ladinar (2025) focusing on the work and trajectory of the Argentine Sephardic playwright, Ricardo Halac, on whom she is writing an intellectual biography. Her book, Madrid's Forgotten Avant–Garde: Between Essentialism and Modernity, published by Sussex Academic Press, is now being translated into Spanish.