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
2215G Jiménez Hall
College Park
MD,
20742
Research Highlights
Otro cancel 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 by Miguel de Cervantes 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.
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.
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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