Marta Staudinger

Marta Staudinger is an artist, art historian and curator. She is the Director and Founder of the Latela Art Gallery in Washington DC, voted DC's Best Commercial Art Gallery in 2016. Marta travels three to four times a year lecturing for Smithsonian Journeys in Italy, Portugal and Spain - countries where she also organizes exhibitions and manages artists. She received her B.A. from George Mason University in Art History specializing in Italian Renaissance, Italian Baroque and European Modernism. Prior to founding the Latela Art Gallery, Marta worked on archival and curatorial projects in many museums in Florence, Italy including the National Bargello Museum, Medici Chapels, and Casa Martelli; in Barcelona at the Antoni Tàpies Foundation; and in Washington DC at the National Gallery of Art as the Samuel H. Kress Archivist. Additionally, Marta lectured on Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art to international scholars and visitors in Florence for many years and led private tours around the city. A former resident of Florence, Marta left Italy to pursue her M.A. in Barcelona at the Universitat de Ramon Llull in Curatorial Studies. Fluent in English, Italian, and Spanish, she led private tours in Barcelona focusing on art and architecture from Spanish Modernism and Contemporary Culture. 

Franklin Knight

Franklin W. Knight joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University in 1973. He was appointed the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History from 1991 to 2014, when he entered emeritus status. Knight’s research interests focus on social, political and cultural aspects of Latin America and the Caribbean especially after the eighteenth century as well as on American slave systems in their comparative dimensions.  Knight has lectured widely across North and South America, as well as in Europe, Australia, and Japan. He has traveled to Cuba 63 times during the past 35+ years.

Knight has graduated from the University College of the West Indies-London in 1964 where he earned a B.A. He also earned M. A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He taught for several years at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, and was a visiting lecturer at the University of Texas in Austin, Howard University, Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, Colgate University, and in Spain at the Pablo de Olavide University, The University of Huelva, and the University of Andalucía. He has also served on visiting advisory committees of Harvard University, Princeton University, City University of New York, Swarthmore College, Ohio State University, Colgate University, The Schomburg Library, The University of Florida at Gainesville and the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras.

Knight has held research fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Ford Foundation, and the National Humanities Center. He has served on committees of the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Inter-American Foundation, the National Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Conference of Latin American History, The Latin American Studies Association, The American Council of Learned Societies, The Historical Society, and the Association of Caribbean Historians. He is a founding member of The Asociación de Historiadores de América Latina y el Caribe (ADHILAC), the Asociación de Historiadores Latinoamericanos (AHILA), and The Asociación de Historia Económica del Caribe (AHEC).

His analyses of Latin American and Caribbean problems have been aired on National Public Radio, the Voice of America, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the McNeill/Lehrer Report, C-Span, as well as on many local programs on commercial and public radio and television stations across the United States. He served as academic consultant and appeared in seven television programs Columbus and the Age of Discovery; The Buried Mirror;  Americas; Plagued: Invisible Armies; Crucible of Empire: The War of 1898, The Crucible of the Millennium; and The Louisiana Purchase. 

Allen James Fromherz

Dr. Allen Fromherz is a Professor of Mediterranean and Middle East History at Georgia State University in Atlanta. He graduated Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College in 2002 and received his PhD from St. Andrews University in Scotland in Medieval Islamic History in 2006. His first two books, The Almohads: the Rise of an Islamic Empire (IB Tauris) and Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times (Edinburgh University Press) examine the rise of empire in medieval North Africa and Iberia. Dr. Fromherz's most recently completed work The Near West: North Africa and Europe (Edinburgh – Expected end of 2016), examines the history of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish interactions across the Western Mediterranean, especially in Iberia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Italy.  Dr. Fromherz has held several international fellowships from Fulbright, Gerda Henkel Stiftung, the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, and a senior fellowship from NYU Abu Dhabi. Dr. Fromherz has led and organized four study abroads, including the popular Marvels of Medieval Spain: the Culture and History of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. His regular classes on Medieval Spain and the Mediterranean focus on convivencia, how Muslims, Jews, and Christians, living together, created a common culture that still lives on in Iberia to this day.

Francisco García-Serrano

Francisco García-Serrano earned his M.A and Ph.D. in Medieval Iberian History at the University of California, Berkeley and is currently a professor of History in the Department of Humanities at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus.  In addition, he has been a visiting professor at U.C. Berkeley, New York University in Madrid, and Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan.

His research focuses on the influence of the Mendicant Orders in Spain during the late Middle Ages and on religious identity and interfaith relations. Francisco García-Serrano has published Preachers of the City. The Expansion of the Dominican Order in Castile, 1217-1348 (University Press of the South, 1997), and his most recent contributions to collective books include “Del convento al palacio: los frailes y las oligarquías castellanas (siglos XIII-XIV)”, in Isabel Beceiro Pita, dir., Poder, piedad y devoción. Castilla y su entorno (siglos XII-XV) (Silex, Madrid, 2014), and “The Mendicants as a Mediterranean Phenomenon,” in Taryn Chubb and Emily Kelly, ed., Mendicants and Merchants in the Medieval Mediterranean (Brill, 2013). His current book project, The Friars and Their Impact in Medieval Iberia, contains the collaboration of fifteen international specialists.

Professor García-Serrano also serves as the Director of Ibero-American Studies at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, an academic program that he created. In addition he is the current president of the interdisciplinary association AHLiST (2012-2015) and has organized a number of international conferences.

David Gies

David T. Gies is Commonwealth Professor of Spanish Emeritus at the University of Virginia and former Chair of his Department. He has published seventeen books, including The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture (1999), Theatre and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Spain: Juan de Grimaldi as Impresario and Government Agent (Cambridge, 1988), The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge, 1994), The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (2004), The Cambridge History of Theatre in Spain (co-edited, 2012), Eros y amistad (2016), and The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment (co-edited, 2017). Author of more than 120 scholarly and 140 book reviews, he edits DIECIOCHO, a journal dedicated to the study of the Spanish Enlightenment, now in its 42nd year.

He has received the University of Virginia Outstanding Teaching Award, the Thomas Jefferson Award, and, in 2007, was named Encomienda de Número de la Orden de Isabel la Católica, a knighthood granted by His Majesty Juan Carlos, King of Spain.

In July 2013, he was elected for a three-year term as President of the International Association of Hispanists, the world's largest professional organization of Spanish scholars, and in September 2015, he was elected Honorary President of Sigma Delta Pi, the Spanish National Honorary Society.

In 2016, he won the prestigious annual Anderson Imbert Prize from the North American Academy of the Spanish Language and was named Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy in Madrid. In 2019 he joined the Board of the Fundación Duques de Soria.

Ana Maria Afzali

Ana Afzali is a medievalist who specializes in the history and literature of both Spain and Portugal. She is a tenured Professor at Citrus College in Southern California teaching Spanish culture, literature and language courses.

Ana is a scholar of the Iberian Renaissance and she has published extensively on the political and cultural history and literature of Spain and Portugal. She is also the author of the book “Modern Spain” (2009).  Ana has earned both her Masters and Doctorate in Spanish literature and languages from University of California, Los Angeles where she taught for four years.

A native of Madrid, she has traveled and lectured extensively through Spain and Portugal and she is the recipient of numerous academic awards.

Dianne Konz

Since 1992, Dianne Konz has led several Smithsonian Journeys groups to Spain and Portugal. She has taught Spanish literature, language, and civilization at the University of Texas at Austin and at The George Washington University. She has also lectured and published studies on Spanish and Latin American literature, and Spanish culture. Dianne'’s enthusiasm for Iberia grew from her experiences living and studying in Madrid. Her particular passion is the integration of the cultural arts in the context of their time. She approaches art and architecture, literature, music, and gastronomy as a reflection of a country'’s history, politics, and geography. Dianne's teachings of Spanish history and civilization include the Moorish and Islamic periods invasion, conquest, and occupation of Iberia, and the rich cultural heritage of the Islamic presence in Iberia.