Damaris Puñales–Alpízar (Matanzas, Cuba) is Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and an Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU.) She studied Journalism at the University of Havana, and has worked as a journalist in Cuba, Belize, and Mexico. In Belize, she founded Conexión, the first bilingual and trans-border newspaper, and in Mexico she was correspondent for regional and national mass media outlets. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. At CWRU, she teaches Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture. She is the founder and director of two study abroad programs at CWRU: in Cuba (The Cuban Experience: An Immersion in Its Culture and Society) and in Spain (Multicultural Spain: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Coexistence).

Her publications include the books The Damn Circumstance. Scholarly Writings on Cuban Literature (2020), Sieges to the Lettered Cayman: Literature and Power in the Cuban Revolution (2018) -edited with Emilio J. Gallardo Saborido and Jesús Gómez de Tejada-, The Atlantic as Frontier: Cultural Mediations between Cuba and Spain (2014) and Written in Cyrillic. The Soviet Ideal in the post–1990 Cuban Cultural Production (2012).

She has coordinated the special dossiers “Cuba: A Cultural Prospection,” for the academic journal Cuadernos del Sur, (National University of the South, Argentina. Currently in press), and “Cuba: The Soviet Flavor of a Tropical Island. A Visit 20 Years Later,” for La Habana Elegante. Revista semestral de literatura y cultura cubana, caribeña, latinoamericana, y de estética No. 51 (Spring-Summer 2012). Her scholarly articles have appeared in leading journals in the United States, Cuba, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Canada, Peru, France and Spain, such as Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Caribbean Studies, Revista Iberoamericana, La Habana Elegante, Kamchatka, Vallejo&Co, Revista de Letras, Artelogie, Cuadernos del Sur, Teatro, Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos, etc.

In 2018, Dr. Puñales-Alpízar was a Fulbright Scholar in Russia to complete research for her next scholarly project on the geopolitics of socialist translations. Recently, she won an Expanding Horizons Initiative Grant to organize the international conference “Translation Practices during the Cold War: A Multidisciplinary Approach.”

During the 2013–2015 period, Puñales-Alpízar was elected delegate from the Great Lakes region to the Modern Language Association.

Regularly, she writes and translates for the Collective Arts Network Journal, CAN, in Cleveland, and publishes op-ed pieces in a Spain newspaper. She is a Member of the Board of LatinUS Theater Experience Company, in Cleveland, and founder and vice-president of the non-profit organization Trasatlántica. Poetry and Scholarship. She is also member of the Editorial Board of the academic journal Caribe.