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
Member, 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
2215J 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
2215G Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Research Highlights
Avocado Dreams Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area
Ana Patricia Rodríguez latest book, "Avocado Dreams Remaking Salvadoran Life and Art in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area," has just been published by The University of Arizona Press.
Author/Lead: Ana Patricia Rodríguez
For more than four generations, Salvadorans have made themselves at home in the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area and have transformed the region, contributing their labor, ingenuity, and culture to the making of a thriving but highly neglected and overlooked community.
In Avocado Dreams, Ana Patricia Rodríguez draws from her own positionality as a Salvadoran transplant to examine the construction of the unique Salvadoran cultural imaginary made in the greater D.C. area. Through a careful reading of the creative works of local writers, performers, artists, and artivists, Rodríguez demonstrates how the people have remade themselves in relation to the cultural, ethnoracial, and sociolinguistic diversity of the area. She discusses how Salvadoran people have developed unique, intergenerational Salvadoreñidades, manifested in particular speech and symbolic acts, ethnoracial embodiments, and local identity formations in relation to the diverse communities, most notably Black Washingtonians, who co-inhabit the region.
This timely and relevant work not only enriches our understanding of Salvadoran diasporic experiences but also contributes significantly to broader discussions on migration, identity, and cultural production in the United States.
Diásporas & Fronteras: De los Exilios de 1936-1939 a los Refugiados Climáticos
Explore the journey from the exiles of the Spanish Civil War to present-day climate refugees in Diásporas & Fronteras, edited by José María Naharro-Calderón.
Author/Lead: José María Naharro-CalderónSince the summer of 2002, the Diasporas and Borders seminars have been held under the academic banner of Aula de las Diásporas (Diasporas Classroom), coordinated by José María Naharro Calderón at the House of Culture of the Llanes City Council (Asturias). These seminars have examined key issues and records stemming from the 1936 coup d'état and its totalitarian and exile-driven consequences in Spain, which, among others, definitively affected Asturians from October 1937 onwards. These courses, and the selection of papers presented here, have also addressed past exiles and present-day migrations.
Otro cincel para Rosetta. España y el español en la temprana modernidad de los Estados Unidos
Another chisel for Rosetta. Spain and Spanish Language in Early Modern United States
Author/Lead: Carmen Benito-Vessels“Another chisel for Rosetta. Spain and Spanish Language in Early Modern United States”, thoroughly documents that the history of Early Modern North America is strongly linked to late medieval and Early modern Spain’s literary, architectural and linguistic traditions. Benito-Vessels articulate a new beginning for the narrative of how Native American lands and histories became European lands and history in the 16th century. She brings to light the history of the first Native American bilingual speakers of the Spanish and Algonquian Languages. The author also documents the first steps of 16th-17th century Spanish Language on the East Coast of the United States through cartography, administrative forms, missionary catechisms and oral narratives (as transcribed by the most famous humanist of his times, Pedro Martir de Anglería, and a revered historian of the New World: Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo). The language used by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote belongs to the same bracket period.
Benito Vessels proves that The Florida Poem by Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo (1599) is a Bridge Between the Castilian Middle Ages and the Early New World Modernity. Finally, in this book, Carmen Benito-Vessels contributes a new perspective to the “Neo-medievalism” field of study by focusing on: the “antiquities topoi,” the lineage tradition in US society, literary works such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) by Mark Twain, and the architectural replicas of Gothic buildings and the so-called Romanesque renderings.