Laura Lomas, Professor (Ph.D. Columbia 2001), teaches comparative American studies, Latina/o/x literature and culture, ethnic and immigrant literature of the United States and the Americas, women’s writing, nineteenth century studies, and feminist and decolonial theory in the English Department and the Graduate Program in American Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. Lomas is author of Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects and American Modernities (Duke University Press, 2008), which received the Modern Language Association’s Prize for best book in Chicana and Chicano and Latina and Latino Studies, and an Honorable Mention for the Latin American Studies Association’s Latino Studies Section Book Award. Against monumentalizing and nation-centered readings, this book defines New York-based Cuban José Martí as a cultural translator of the imperial modernity of the United States in texts addressed to readers throughout the Hispanophone world. This perspective, as an organizer of Cuban and Puerto Rican migrants in New York, as a racialized Latino migrant inside the monster’s entrails–as he famously situated himself–shaped his aesthetic experiments in modernist poetry and prose in the 1880s and 1890s.