Join us for our Wednesday Lunch Series, featuring guest speakers from Cornell's faculty and staff as well as the surrounding community. Enjoy an informal discussion where you can learn more about the speaker’s work or research, how they ended up doing what they are doing, current issues in higher education, or even their thoughts on living in Ithaca. Boxed lunches will be available to take away at the end of in-person sessions.

Julia Chang is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Studies, a member of the core faculty in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and affiliated faculty in the Southeast Asia Program. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Language and Literatures with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality from the University of California, Berkeley. She has also taught at Brown University and San Quentin State Prison. Her areas of specialization include nineteenth-century Spanish literature and culture with a special focus on the realist novel, gender studies, and medical hygiene. More recently, she has begun research on Hispano-Filipino relations and late Spanish imperialism.Professor Chang’s current book manuscript (under contract)—Blood Novels: Gender, Caste, and Race in Spanish Realism—examines the cultural and theoretical significance of blood and bloodlines in the works of Juan Valera, Benito Pérez Galdós, and Leopoldo Alas. In reading fiction alongside medical literature, Blood Novels demonstrates that the politics of blood played a decisive role in social hierarchies and the management of life in an era of belated modernization and imperial decline. She also has two new research projects. The first examines the racialized and gendered contours of Hispano-Filipino relations after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The second theorizes the concept of utility in relation to military masculinity in the aftermath of American emancipation and Spanish colonial defeat.