Michael Grafals defended his dissertation in Spring 2016. He is now an Instructor in English at Florida International University; his main interests include the study of discourses of cross-cultural becoming and fictions of transnational belonging. He is currently at work on a manuscript on Puerto Rican writers who reconfigure their nation's spatial identifications beyond those established historically through Spanish and U.S. colonization. This tradition, represented by writers like Luis Palés Matos, Iris Zavala, Manuel Ramos Otero and Eduardo Lalo, constructs subversive transnational formations that contest institutionalized spaces of colonization and modernization. His work also explores resonances between Caribbean theories of cross-cultural relation and U.S. ethnic literatures.