Introduction

Nicola Gilmour is a Senior Lecturer in Spanish at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Auckland in New Zealand in 2001. In 2006 she published a monograph on narrative transvestism: Transvestite Narratives in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Hispanic Authors: Using the Voice of the Opposite Gender (Edwin Mellen), in which she studied the work of both Spanish and Latin American authors. Her current research is related to the deployment of images of the historical religious minorities of fifteenth-century Spain in contemporary Spanish literature between 1992 and 2007 however she retains a strong interest in Latin American literature and comparative cultural studies.

Warwick Murray is Professor of Human Geography at Victoria University of Wellington. His PhD from the University of Birmingham UK (1997) focused on the impact of neoliberal economic policy on peasant farmers in Chile and his current research explores broader geographies of globalization and development. He is author of Geographies of Globalisation (Routledge, 2006) and former editor-in-chief (2002-2010) of Asia Pacific Viewpoint, an international journal published by Wiley-Blackwell. He has regional specialisms in the Pacific Islands, Pacific Asia and Latin America. In 2006 he won a New Zealand Tertiary Teaching Excellence Award and this was followed in 2007 by the New Zealand Geographical Society’s President’s Medal. He is currently Director of the Geography Programme at Victoria and is founding Director of Victoria Institute for Links with Latin America. In his spare time he plays lead guitar in Wellington Cuban Trio, Cuba Blue.