Speakers and Presenters

Assistant Professor of Theology 
Rosary College of Arts and Sciences 
Dominican University 

Dr. Herrera-Montero is a Catholic practical theologian and assistant professor of theology at Dominican University. She is a native of Bogotá, Colombia where she pursued her undergraduate studies in International Relations and Political Sciences from Universidad del Rosario. She holds an M.A. in Pastoral Ministries and a Ph.D. in Practical Theology from St. Thomas University. Her scholarly work sits at the intersection of U.S. Latina/x theologies, practical theology, and the social sciences. Her latest peer-review publications and presentations include Participatory Action Research (PAR) and the exploration of religious identity, spirituality, and social contexts among college-age Latinas. Dr. Herrera serves as the Secretary of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (ACHTUS). She has contributed to the formation of Hispanic Ministry leaders from the Dioceses of the Southeast and worked in campus ministry for a decade. As a Latina practical theologian, she draws from the spiritual and cultural wells of both the U.S. Latinx Catholic experience and the Latin American experience. https://claudiaherrera.academia.edu/ 

Daisy L. Machado serves as the Executive Director of the Hispanic Summer Program and is Professor Emerita of American Religious History at Union Theological Seminary. She holds a B.A. from Brooklyn College; an M.S.W. from Hunter College School of Social Work; a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary; and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She is the first U.S. Latina ordained in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in 1981 in the Northeast Region and has served inner city congregations in Brooklyn, Houston, and Fort Worth.

From 1996-1999, Dr. Machado served as the first Director of the Hispanic Theological Initiative, a $3.4 million project funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts to increase the presence of Latinx faculty teaching in seminaries, schools of religion, and religion departments around the country. She was also academic dean at Lexington Theological Seminary in Lexington, KY and Union Theological Seminary in NYC where she was the first Latina to serve as academic dean at both schools.

Dr. Machado has also been invited to teach in various schools including as Luce Lecturer in Urban Ministry at Harvard Divinity School and Lecturer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, Dallas, Texas. She has also been a speaker at numerous conferences in the United States and abroad. She was the first Latina to serve as Chaplain for the Summer Season in 2015 at the Chautauqua Institution where her sermons were heard in the daily chapels with over 600 participants every day and will return to again serve as Chaplain in July 2023.

Her latest publication is Borderland Religion: Ambiguous Practices of Difference and Hope, an anthology published in 2019, co-edited with Dr. Trygve Wyller (Norway) and Dr. Bryan Turner (Australia), which contains essays by a group of international scholars. In this anthology she also has an essay titled “Santa Muerte: A Transgressing Saint Transgresses Borders”. In addition, Dr. Machado has also authored many book chapters on the borderlands, among them: the chapter “History and Latino Identity: Mapping A Past That Leads to Our Future” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology, 2nd edition, 2023; “Borderlife and the Religious Imagination” in the anthology Religion and Politics; “Voices from Nepantla: Latinas in U.S. Religious History” in Feminist Intercultural Theology; “’El gran avivamiento del ‘33’: The Protestant Missionary Enterprise, Revival, Identity, and Tradition” in Futuring Our Past: Explorations in the Theology of Tradition; “The Southern U.S. Border: Immigration, the Historical Imagination, and Globalization” in Rethinking Economic Globalization; and “La Otra América – The Other America” in A Dream Unfinished: Theological Reflections on America from the Margins. She is also co-editor of the anthology, A Reader in Critical Latina Feminist Theology which contains her essay “The Unnamed Woman: Justice, Feminists, and the Unnamed Woman.” Her first monograph on the issue of the borderlands was Of Borders and Margins: Hispanic Disciples in Texas, 1888-1945. In May 2023, she received an Honorary Doctorate from Drew University in Madison, N.J. 

 A native of Cuba, Dr. Machado came to the New York City with her parents at the age of three and though she has lived in many parts of the United States, she is a New Yorker at heart who loves a good bagel and will always make room for a pastrami on rye with mustard.