Board of Directors

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

PRESIDENT
Joanna Wilk-Racięska

VICE-PRESIDENT
María Antonia Pérez-Andujar

Joanna Wilk-Racięska, PhD, D.Sc.
Professor in the Institute of Linguistics, University of Silesia in Katowice

Until 2018, she was head of the Department of Iberian and Latino American Studies. In the years 2012-2017, she was Professor in the Matej Bela University in Slovakia. Her research interests focus on semantics, semantics of humor, pragmatics, and cognitive and cultural linguistics. She investigates the nature of meaning, especially tense and aspect, and the conceptualization of meanings in various languages, hence her interest in translation studies, lexical semantics and cognitive poetics. Her research is interdisciplinary, because, apart from linguistic tools (semantics, pragmatics and cognitivism), Prof. Wilk-Racięska draws on concepts from philosophy and sociology and cultural anthropology. She has created a new methodology of cultural linguistics, understood as a multi-dimensional research system, in which the tools employed are adjusted to the subject of analysis. She is the author of 4 monographs and about 60 articles, she is also the author or co-author of 9 multi-author monographs. Since 2017, she has been the president of the International Society for Luso-Hispanic Humor Studies (UMKC, USA), and member of 6 other academic societies and 7 editorial boards of peer-reviewed journals. Prof. Wilk-Racięska was also a Visiting Scholar in 5 universities in Spain and Mexico, and the plenary speaker in academic conferences in France, Mexico, Chile and Brazil.

María Antonia Pérez-Andújar, B.S., M.F.A

Artist, Creative Entrepreneur, Self-Publishing Humor Fiction Author

María Antonia brings to the ISLHHS her Fine Arts, Theater, Authorship and Business acumen to assist ISLHHS in organizing, promoting and growing the business and creative aspects of the Society. María is originally from Madrid, Spain, educated in Bordeaux (France). She studied Fine Arts at Northeastern University (Boston), earned a Master’s in Fine Arts Degree in Theatre Scene Design & Technology by the University of Missouri-Kansas City and studied Business Entrepreneurship at the prestigious UMKC’s Regnier Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. She served as a Board Member of International Organization Sister Cities of Kansas City from 2015 to 2016, and the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Kansas City from 2016 to 2019. She founded ART=E=MC2, a grassroots theater production company, and is a successful business founder and manager of the Language Service company Index Lingua. On the lighter side of things, she is a recalcitrant daily user and researcher of Humor, to the point of authoring, with humor cartoonist artist George Fisher Martin (who is incidentally married to her), a series of self published humor stories. Her contributions to the ISLHHS include implementing its legal status in the United States, creating its commercial image and marketing, and providing all necessary administrative, logistical and linguistic support for a successful International Non-Profit. She serves as Vice-President of ISLHHS since 2017.

EXECUTIVE SECRETARY
Karina Santos Lara

Karina Santos Lara

She is Founder and Executive Director of Fundación jaÜja Centro de Estudios Humorísticos; She is co-founder of the Network for Research and Studies of Humor (RIEH, Chile) and Executive Secretary of the International Society for Luso-Hispanic Humor Studies (ISLHHS). She is a journalist by training; Master in Communication Sciences and current PhD candidate in Human Sciences with a mention in Discourse and Culture at the Austral University of Chile, Valdivia. Transdisciplinary researcher of the comic-humorous. Since 2011, she has been a teacher of various humor subjects at the University of La Frontera (Temuco) and a facilitator of humor and popular communication workshops.

TREASURER
Alberto Villamandos

Alberto Villamandos, PhD

Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, he is the author of El discreto encanto de la subversión: Una crítica cultural de la Gauche Divine (Laetoli, 2011) and coeditor of Un Hispanismo para el siglo XXI (Biblioteca Nueva, 2011) with Dr. Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego. He has published his research on contemporary Spain’s culture, memory and graphic novel in several journals. He is currently working on a book manuscript on 1980s neo-Decadent Spanish literature.