Meet our Graduate Faculty
Graduate Faculty
Carmen Benito-Vessels
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
2215A Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Laura Demaría
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
2215B Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Elisa Gironzetti
Associate Director for Undergraduate Academic Affairs, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
2204 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Manel Lacorte
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor and Program Head, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
Maryland Language Science Center
2215D Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Thayse Lima
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor and Advisor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
Equity Partner for Faculty Searches, College of Arts and Humanities
2210 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Ryan Long
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Director and Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
2215C Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Eyda Merediz
Associate Director for Graduate Academic Affairs and Strategic Initiatives, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
2215H Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
José María Naharro-Calderón
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
2102 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Mehl Penrose
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Associate Professor, Classics
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
3123 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor of Caribbean and Latin American Literature, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
2215I Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Ana Patricia Rodríguez
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Associate Professor, American Studies
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
2215E Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Saúl Sosnowski
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Affiliate Faculty, Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center
4202 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Juan Uriagereka
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Professor, Linguistics
Member, Maryland Language Science Center
4225 Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Miguel Valerio
School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor, Spanish and Portuguese
Research Highlights
The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching
30 chapters written in Spanish, provides a comprehensive account of the main theoretical, curricular, and pedagogical foundations for implementing and researching a pedagogy for multiliteracies in Spanish language teaching.
Author/Lead: Manel Lacorte, Elisa GironzettiThe Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching: multimodalidad e interdisciplinariedad, co-edited by Elisa Gironzetti and Manel Lacorte, provides a comprehensive account of the main theoretical, curricular and pedagogical foundations for implementing and researching a pedagogy for multiliteracies in Spanish Language Teaching.
Written entirely in Spanish, the volume is the first handbook to connect the multiple disciplinary perspectives that contribute to a pedagogy for multiliteracies and to bring together renowned and young scholars from around the world to offer the most recent research and a multifaceted view of this field.
Read More about The Routledge Handbook of Multiliteracies for Spanish Language Teaching
The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States
The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States began as a symposium funded in great part by the NEH and has now become an anthology of essays and poetry that makes a passionate case for the essential value of the humanities.
Author/Lead: Eyda M. MeredizNon-ARHU Contributor(s): Tanya Huntington

The assemblage of different languages—Spanish, English and Indigenous, as well as in-between inflections—shows the complexity of linguistic and cultural connections between and within the two nations. The University of Maryland, College Park, along with Georgetown University, the Mexican Cultural Institute, and the Library of Congress came together to organize the original symposium, held in November 2021 in Washington, D.C. and College Park, Maryland. As co- organizers Eyda M. Merediz and Gwen Kirkpatrick put it in the introduction to this volume, “To work in poetry is to navigate manifold meanings, unanticipated relationships between joy and sorrow, play and lamentation, the everyday and the sacred, high and low, the oral and the written.”
Here, fourteen scholars and poets from Mexico and the United States attest to the power of contemporary poetry through essays on topics ranging from “Poetic Breadth in the 21st Century” to “Translation in a Global World,” from “Representing and Defying Affect through the Body Poetic” to the “Linguistic and Geographic Remappings of Indigenous Poetics.” These invigorating texts are complemented by an anthology of verse published in the original languages, as well as in English or Spanish translation. The volume’s intellectual and linguistic diversity offers a vibrant picture of the power of poetry today and for all time.
Read More about The Shared Language of Poetry: Mexico and the United States
The Multimodal Performance of Conversational Humor by John Benjamins Press, Figurative Thought and Language Series
In the book, the humorous framing of an utterance is shown to be negotiated and co-constructed dialogically and multimodally, through changes and patterns of smiling synchronicity, smiling intensity, and eye movements.
Author/Lead: Elisa Gironzetti
This volume is the first monograph exploring the functions of visual cues in humor, advocating for the development of a non-linguocentric theory of humor performance. It analyzes a corpus of dyadic, face-to-face interactions in Spanish and English to study the relationship between humor, smiling, and gaze, and shows how, by focusing on these elements, it is possible to shed light on the “unsaid” of conversations. In the book, the humorous framing of an utterance is shown to be negotiated and co-constructed dialogically and multimodally, through changes and patterns of smiling synchronicity, smiling intensity, and eye movements. The study also analyzes the multimodal features of failed humor and proposes a new categorization from a dialogic perspective. Because of its interdisciplinary approach, which includes facial expression analysis and eye-tracking, this book is relevant to humor researchers as well as scholars in social and behavioral sciences interested in multimodality and embodied cognition.