NeMLA Staff

Victoria L. Ketz is professor of Spanish and Chair, Global Languages, Literatures, and Perspectives at La Salle University in Philadelphia, PA. She has served as the Acting Executive Director of the Northeast Modern Language Association since 2024, Vice President 2022-2024, and President for 2024-2025. She is co-editor of  A Laboratory of Her Own: Women and Science in Spanish Culture (2021), which gathers diverse voices to address women's interaction with STEM fields in the context of Spanish cultural production. This volume focuses on the many ways the arts and humanities provide avenues for deepening the conversation about how women have been involved in, excluded from, and represented within the scientific realm.

Derek DiMatteo is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Gannon University (Erie, PA). His research and teaching interests include: 20th and 21st century American literature; transnational, immigrant, and ethnic literature; protest literature; pedagogy and methods of teaching English; and young adult literature. He is a former managing editor of the academic journal  Africa Today (IU Press). He was a Visiting Lecturer at Indiana University - Bloomington, where he earned his PhD in English literature with a minor in American Studies. During 2003-2012, he lived in Japan and taught first at Kaichi Jr/Sr High School (Saitama) and later at Lakeland University Japan (Tokyo). During that time, he was very active in the Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT). Outside of academia, he enjoys training in jiu-jitsu, cooking with friends, playing Catan, and catching up on pleasure reading or recent Netflix series.