Spanish Program Alumni

Leonel Alvarado is Programme Coordinator, Spanish Subject Convenor and Senior Lecturer in Spanish in the Programme of European and Latin American Studies at Massey University in New Zealand. He has published Vida y obra de Bulnes el memorioso (2007) and Sombras de hombres (2003), which won the Central American Essay Award. He has also published fiction and poetry, among which are Diario del odio (1998), which won the Letras de Oro Fiction Award, and El reino de la zarza (1994). Professor Alvarado’s research interests include literary criticism, fiction, poetry, music and popular cultures of Latin America, with a particular focus on Central America. His essays have appeared in Hispamérica, Cuadernos Americanos, and Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, among others.

Sebastián Bartís is instructor of Spanish at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School in Washington DC.His areas of interest are 20th century Latin American Literature, Literary Theory, Film, and Music and TV Studies. He is also actively involved in the design of blended courses and the uses of technology in language and culture classes. He was a 2013-2014 fellow for the Center for Teaching Excellence’s “Summer Institutes on Teaching and Learning with New(er) Technologies.”

In 2015 Sebastián was recognized by the UMD Graduate School as Outstanding Teaching Assistant and Outstanding Administrative Assistant.

Mariluz is currently at University of Huelva (Spain) to conduct research on" the 1939 Exile Short Story" within the larger context of the evolution of the genre  in Mexico from the XIX C up to 1953.

Jason Bartles is Assistant Professor of Language at West Chester University in the Department of Languages and Cultures. He has taught courses at the graduate and the undergraduate level on Latin~s in the United States and Latin American literature, film, politics and economics, avant-gardes and mass media, and politics and aesthetics, as well as language courses. His research interests include contemporary Latin American literatures and cultures, critical theory, re-inscriptions of the 19th century, and gender and queer studies. 

Denis Berenschot is Assistant Professor of Spanish in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Shepherd University. In 1995, he published Performing Cuba: (Re)Writing Gender Identity and Exile Across Genres. He specializes in Contemporary Cuban literature and theater. Every summer he leads a travel abroad program to a Latin American country or to Spain. He is also the coordinator of the Spanish section and the Spanish education program.

Coral Bracho is a Mexican poet and translator. She has published numerous books of poetry, including, Peces de piel fugaz (1977), Bajo el destello líquido (1988), Jardín del mar (1993), and Cuarto de hotel (2007). In 2000, Bracho was chosen as a Guggenheim Fellow, and she was awarded the Premio Xavier Villarrutia in 2004 for the collection, Ese espacio, ese jardín (2003). Her works have also been translated into English, Portuguese and French.

Cristina Burneo is a tenured professor at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito, in the Colegio de Artes Liberales. She teaches courses in postmodern Western literature, literary translation (theory and praxis), and Latin American poetry. Currently, she is working to create a minor in translation and to found a translation center for the USFQ. She is also researching the relationship between science and poetry, and the history of scientific and literary translation in Ecuador.

Luis Fernando Charry is a Colombian writer. He has published the novels Alford (2002), Los niños suicidas (2004), Ruinas familiares (2010), and La naturaleza de las penas (2012). He has also published a book of short stories entitled La furia de los elementos (2007). In addition, he has participated in the books Fricciones urbanas: 11 escritores escriben sobre 11 ciudades (2004), Palabra capital: Bogotá develada (2007), and Calibre 39 (2007). In 2008 he won the National Poetry Prize for the book Las tardes. He has taught at The George Washington University and Georgetown University. Currently, he teaches at the University of Maryland and writes articles for different Colombian magazines and newspapers.  

Fernando Degiovanni is Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Latin American Studies at Wesleyan University. He specializes in issues of nationalism, cultural politics and canon formation in Argentina. By focusing on the first popular series of national "classic" authors in the early twentieth century, his research explores the way in which opposing intellectual projects attempted to build and impose contrasting versions of the Argentine cultural tradition in times of massive immigration and democratic institutionalization. His work has been published in major scholarly journals, including Revista Iberoamericana, Hispamérica, and Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana. He was awarded the Alfredo Roggiano Prize for his book, Los textos de la patria: Nacionalismo, políticas culturales y canon en Argentina (Beatriz Viterbo, 2007).

Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican writer and literary critic. He has worked as part-time professor at the Ibero-American University in Mexico City, and he has acted as editor for various cultural journals. Since 1990, Enrigue has worked as a literary critic, writing for magazines both in Mexico and in Spain. For La muerte de un instalador he was awarded the Joaquín Mortiz Award for a first novel in 1996.  Enrigue has also published a collection of short stories, Virtudes capitales (1998), and a novel, El cementerio de sillas (2002). In addition, Enrigue has written numerous articles on literature which were broadcast in various radio programs in Mexico. He is Associate Professor of Roman Languages and Literatures at Hoftra University.

Luis Fernando Restrepo is Professor of Spanish, comparative literature, and Latin American and Latino Studies in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas, and in 2010 he was appointed Assistant Vice Provost for Diversity. His area of specialization is colonial Latin America, but he has also conducted research and taught courses on contemporary indigenous literatures in Latin America, violence and resistance in the Americas, literature and human rights, and film and interdisciplinary studies. He has been a visiting professor at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, with a Fulbright Scholar Award, and at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. He serves on the editorial boards of Confluencia (Colorado), Revista Estudios de Literatura Colombiana (Universidad de Antioquia) and Cuadernos de Literatura (Universidad Javeriana). His current research project is on the music and the ethnopolitics of memory in Colombia. Since 2004, he has been directing the graduate program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.

Rosario Ferré is a Puerto Rican writer, poet, and essayist. Many of her works have engaged in themes of race, class, gender and sexuality, while merging Puerto Rican folk tales with Western myths. She published her first collection of short stories, Papeles de Pandora, in 1976. Since then, she has published in both Spanish and English. Ferré's books include, among others, Maldito amor (1986), Sweet Diamond Dust (1989), The Battle of the Virgins (1994), Eccentric Neighborhoods (1998), and Flight of the Swan (2001).In addition to numerous literary prizes, Ferré was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2004.

Macarena García-Avello is an Assistant Professor at University of Cantabria in Santander. Her research focuses on Transnational Literature, Latina/o Studies and Contemporary Literature. She holds a PhD in Hispanic Studies from the University of Maryland (2017) and a PhD in Gender and Women´s Studies from the University of Oviedo (2014). 

María Gómez Martín is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at California State University San Marcos, where she teaches courses at the graduate and undergraduate level on Translation Studies, contemporary Spanish literature and culture, and History of the Spanish language. She is currently working on developing a Translation Certificate for the Modern Languages Department at CSUSM. Her research interests extend to transnational narratives, exile and travel literature, as well as Hispanic applied linguistics and Spanish heritage language acquisition and maintenance.

Carina González is currently teaching Literary Theory at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She was Assistant Professor of Spanish-American Literature at the University of Florida. Her dissertation, Wandering virtues. Chaos and Eccentricity in Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, explores the creation of a new narrative derived from cultural displacements throughout the Atlantic. She has focused her research on Juan Rodolfo Wilcock, an Argentinean writer who emigrated to Italy in the 1960s, whose eclectic writings can be viewed as a way of subverting the traditional canon by incorporating external discourses such as technology, entropy and mass media. Her book Ficciones de lo raro. Dispersión y desaparición de Juan Rodolfo Wilcock is forthcoming. She is currently working on a new research project related to Latin American writers and exile. Her main areas of interest are Transatlantic Studies, Migration and Literary Theory.

Michael J. Horswell is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and dean of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. He specializes in the colonial literature of the Andes. In addition to teaching in the Latin American and Comparative Literatures graduate programs at Florida Atlantic University, he is the Associate Chair and Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Languages and Linguistics and the head of the Spanish Studies program. In 2006, he published Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press), which deconstructs literary tropes of sexuality and reads between the lines of textual fragments of colonial discourse to provide an alternative history and interpretation of the much maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as “sodomites.” His current research focuses on both colonial and postcolonial literary criticism, colonial and transatlantic literatures from Latin America, and Andean literature and culture.

Tanya Huntington Hyde is a U.S. artist and writer living in Mexico City. Her poetry and articles have appeared in df, Hoja por hoja, Letras Libres and Literal: Latin American Voices, among others. Her artwork has been exhibited in Mexico and the United States; most recently, she exhibited the show “Mexican Nature/Naturaleza Mexicana” at the Houston Institute for Culture in Texas, at the Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City, and at the Tinoco y Palacios Gallery in Oaxaca. Currently, she writes for The Guardian.

Alison Krögel is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Denver. Her book, Food, Power, and Resistance in the Andes: Exploring Quechua Verbal and Visual Narratives, was published in 2011. Her research includes studies of the contemporary Quechua oral tradition, artistic representations of resistance by the Quechua people in colonial and contemporary contexts, as well as the roles played by food and cooks in Andean literature and culture. Professor Krögel is currently working on several projects involving the study of contemporary Quechua poetry.

Lázaro Lima is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Chair in the Liberal Arts, and is Professor of Latino Studies in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College, CUNY. He was professor of Latin American and Iberian Studies and American Studies at the University of Richmond. His publications include The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory; Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing (co-edited with Felice Picano); Trevor Young: The Aesthetics of Displacement; and the forthcoming Sonia Sotomayor: An American Life After Multiculturalism. Professor Lima's interdisciplinary work on inter-American literatures and cultural history has also appeared in American Literary History, Revista Iberoamericana, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Hispanic Review and many other journals. In addition, he has published poetry and exhibited his photography, paintings and documentaries.

Rachel Linville is Assistant Professor of Spanish at SUNY, Brockport. She is currently the Director of Programs in Spain, Coordinator of Beginner Level Spanish, Faculty Mentor for the Foreign Language Club, and Director of Spanish House. Among her publications are “La literatura como arma social: un examen del matrimonio en el Poema de Mio Cid,” which appeared in Medievalia, and two forthcoming articles, “The Idealization of Memory in Soldiers of Salamis.” (“La idealización de la memoria en Soldados de Salamina”) in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and “Collective and Traumatic Memory in The Sleeping Voice” (“Memoria colectiva y traumática en La voz dormida”) in Modern Language Notes.

Martha Ann Maus is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the West Virginia Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on transatlantic studies in early modernity. She currently is a visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Hampden-Sydney College.

María Cristina Monsalve Salazar (1983), originally from Quito-Ecuador, earned her Ph.D. in 2017. Currently, she is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wabash College in Indiana. María Cristina’s dissertation explored the poetics of ruins and the theory of the fragmentary writing on the work of the great and neglected poet Martín Adán. Her project compiles and analyzes the dispersed verses of the long poem entitled La mano desasida. Her dissertation benefited from the International Graduate Fellowship Award IGRF (2015) and the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship (2016). María Cristina’s fields of interest are 20th century Latin American Literature and its connections with Philosophy, Philology, and History of Science. Recently, she explores the fields of Experimental Writing and Digital Humanities. 

Roxana Patiño is currently Professor of twentieth century Latin American literature at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba in Argentina. Her research has been published in various journals, including Ínsula, Hispamérica, and Revista Iberoamericana. She is the author of Intelectuales en transición: las revistas culturales argentinas (1981-1987) (Sao Paolo, 1997), Narrativas políticas e identidades intelectuales en Argentina (1990-2000) (College Park, 2003), El materialismo cultural de Raymond Williams (Epoke, 2001), and, co-edited with Jorge Schwartz, Revistas literarias/culturales latinoamericanas del siglo XX (IILI, 2004).

Diana P. Romero specializes in Colombian and Latin American literatures, and she has been working as a full-time lecturer at Columbia University since 2004. She has been a lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University and at Yale University. Diana received the Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award given by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Maryland, and the Excellence in Teaching Award given by the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the behest of the students. She believes that teaching and learning are multidirectional and multifaceted processes where the meaningful and creative involvement of all the participants is essential.

José Ramón Ruisánchez is a Mexican writer and literary critic teaching and researching at the University of Houston. He has written various novels, among which are Novelita de amor y poco piano (México, 1996), which won the Premio Juan Rulfo for a first novel in 1993, Remedios infalibles contra el hipo: novela con guarnición (Joaquín Mortiz, 1998), and Nada cruel (Era, 2008). In addition, his essays on Mexican literature have appeared in Literatura Mexicana and Revista de Literatura Mexicana Contemporánea.

Emeritus Professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (USA), where she was Professor of Hispanic American Literature, Director of Postgraduate Studies, and Director of the Estudios en Lenguas y Literaturas Románicas (NCSRLL) collection. She is a member of the scientific committee of Garoza. Revista de la Sociedad Española de Cultura Popular and of the editorial board of Romance Notes, Hispanófila, Nuestra América, Magazine Modernista and Journal of Hispanic Modernism. In addition to numerous articles, she has published The multifaceted art of juanramonian lyrical caricatures (Madrid, 1967) and Rafael Arévalo Martínez (Boston, 1974). She has also edited two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography: Vol I. Modern Spanish American Poets. Argentina to El Salvador (Detroit, 2003) and Vol. II. Guatemala to Venezuela (Detroit, 2004).

Òscar O. Santos-Sopena is an Assistant Professor of Applied Languages, Culture & Education at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain). He has taught courses at the graduate and the undergraduate level on Comparative Literature, Mediterranean Studies, Spanish and English  literature, film, art and history, Cultural Studies, and Education, as well as language courses. His research interests include Spanish and Catalan literatures and cultures, Interculturality, Catalan Humanism and Spanish Golden Age, and Digital Humanities. Before moving back to Madrid, Dr. Santos-Sopena held a position as Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature and was the Director of WT in Madrid at West Texas A&M University (2013-2016). 

Abril Trigo is the Distinguished Humanities Professor of Latin American Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the Ohio State University. His research in Latin American Cultural Studies spans a wide range of interests, including nineteenth century Latin American thought, theater and film, popular culture and cultural theory, and globalization studies. His major publications include, among others, Critical Index of Uruguayan Theater/Indice crítico del teatro uruguayo, co-edited with Graciela Míguez (The Ohio State University Libraries, 2009), Memorias migrantes. Testimonios y ensayos sobre la diáspora uruguaya (Beatriz Viterbo/Ediciones Trilce, 2003), ¿Cultura uruguaya o culturas linyeras? (Para una cartografía de la neomodernidad posuruguaya) (Vintén, 1997), and Caudillo, estado, nación. Literatura, historia e ideología en el Uruguay (Ediciones Hispamérica, 1990). In collaboration with Alicia Ríos and Ana Del Sarto, he published The Latin American Cultural Studies Reader (Duke, 2004).

Ivonne Bruneau-Botello is the Chair of the Department of World Languages and Philosophy in Montgomery College, Rockville campus. She earned her M.A. in SLAA and Spanish from the University of Maryland, College Park and her B.A. in Journalism from the University of Panama. She taught Spanish for ten years on the Takoma/Silver Spring campus (2011-2021); seven of them served as the Humanities Department Chair (2014-2021).  Ivonne has over 18 years of solid work experience in curriculum development, research, teaching, and translations as well as interpretation in addition to working as a journalist for over 8 years. She is member of the Sigma Delta Phi Honor Society, and is an elected board member for the Maryland Foreign Language Association (MFLA).

Christina Gentile, UMD College Park Alumni from our department, is currently Associate Professor of Spanish and Italian at Montgomery College. She was Acting Chair of the Department of World Languages and Philosophy at Rockville.

María Elena is a teacher at the Private High School in San Martin de Valdeiglesias, Madrid.

María Elena is Associate Professor at McDaniel College in Maryland.
 

José Alfredo is a lecturer at St. Joseph University and Vilanova College.

Professor DeLutis-Eichenberger earned her PhD from the University of Maryland in Spanish Language and Literature in 2010. Her research primarily focuses on the nineteenth century and the Southern Cone. Her work on Andrés Bello and José Victorino Lastarria has appeared in Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Revista Hispánica Moderna, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Decimonónica, and as a chapter in the book, Negotiating Space in Latin America (edited by Patricia Vilches, Brill Publishers; winner of the 2020 “Outstanding Academic Title” Award from Choice Magazine).

She has published articles and studies on literature and art in books, magazines and newspapers in Spanish and English, as well as literary translations from German. Co-author, with Yolanda Bedregal, of Art History for children (Plural Editores, La Paz, 2009). Co-editor of Cuentos de Walter Montenegro (Ed. Plural, La Paz, 2018) and Selected Work of Yolanda Bedregal (Library of the Bicentennial of Bolivia, La Paz, in press).
Professor at the Universities UMD (Maryland), UMSA and UCB (La Paz). Director of the Department of Culture and Art at the Bolivian Catholic University "San Pablo", La Paz Regional Academic Unit; She is in charge of the artistic expression workshops, the writing and publishing center and the teaching area of humanistic training subjects, as well as research on cultures, heritage and humanities.

Ann is lecturer at the Catholic University in Washington DC. She completed her Master’s Degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, College Park.  Her interests reside in the Realist and Naturalist novel of the 19th Century, in particular Galdós, Pardo Bazán and Blasco Ibáñez, the Spanish post-war novel, the contemporary Spanish narrative and the relationship between stock market tendencies and literary production.

María is Assistant Professor at the University of California-San Marcos.

Melissa González-Contreras, PhD, joined Cabrini University’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures in August 2018. Her area of specialization is Southern Cone theatrical studies. Particularly, Chilean theatrical production during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990). She is interested in how the theatrical production served as a way to question, delegitimize, and confront hegemonic power structures such as the State, an economic model, or the conception of the ideal citizen. Her research focuses on the mechanisms by which these productions challenge the traditional notions of theatre audience, character, and space in the text and during the theatrical event.

Norman is Docente Investigador at Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja, Ecuador.

Rocío is Associate Professor at the Christopher Newport University. She started her undergraduate studies in the University of Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and finished in 2006 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Jerusalem, Israel) where she also completed her M.A. in 2007 in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies. She focuses on Contemporary Latin American film and literature, especially from Argentina. She has presented her work in several local and international conferences and has published articles on both film and literature. Her book Narrativas de la suspensión (Narratives of suspension) was published in 2017. Her most recent research focuses on third generation Jewish-Argentinean filmmakers and on the representation of the slums in current Argentinean cinema.

Dr. Gordon taught Spanish language and Latin American culture classes at the University of Maryland, College Park (2007-2013) and at Lafayette College (2012-2013). She also was a faculty member in Middlebury Languages Schools three summers (2011, 2012 and 2015). At Christopher Newport University she teaches Spanish language and culture classes (especially Spanish in the Digital Age and Conversation via Cinema), upper level Latin American literature and culture classes, the Modern Languages Senior Seminar and International Cinema.

Salvador is Associate Professor, Spanish; Chair, Spanish Language, Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Denver. His research focuses on contemporary Latin American narrative, with an emphasis in the Spanish speaking Caribbean, particularly Puerto Rico. He has written about the uses of popular music within literary texts, especially the bolero in the contemporary novel. Themes of his courses include popular culture, fiction and nation formation, musicality in fiction, and the cultural contributions of peoples of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. He is affiliated with the University of Denver Latino Center for Community Engagement and Scholarship (DULCCES), and currently serve as President of the Puerto Rican Studies Association (PRSA).

Dr. Moreno has fifteen years of experience leading, designing, and implementing international education programs in higher education. Before joining the UMD ISSS team, she was the Associate Dean of International Education and a visiting faculty member at Washington College.  She oversaw the Global Education Office’s operations during her tenure, established and taught the College’s first virtual exchange program, and led initiatives to expand cross-cultural engagement on campus.

Dr. Moreno started working in the field of global education as faculty director of the UMD Department of Spanish and Portuguese’s winter term programs in Spain and Cuba, and she also served as the assistant director for the Jimenez-Porter House Community-Service Learning program in Chile. She earned her B.A. in public communication from the University of Puerto Rico and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Her research focuses primarily on anti-slavery narratives written in the Hispanic Caribbean. In particular, her book entitled Escritura, derecho y esclavitud: Francisco José de Jaca ante el nomos colonial (Editorial Puerto 2016) explores Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca’s significance as the first intellectual within the Spanish-American tradition to incorporate the notion of human rights (humanos derechos) in his writing in order to construct a legal framework that would have granted freedom to all black slaves. Recent work has examined the systemic racial violence created by the official legal corpus in the colonies´ normative universe. Additionally, her work explores the cultural and political legacies of colonialism in contemporary Spanish Caribbean.

Andrew is Assistant Professor at Liberty University. He has spent nearly two years living abroad in Latin American countries and taught English as a Foreign Language at the elementary and high school levels in Guatemala. His dissertation (“Refashioning the Legacies of Lampião, Che Guevara, and Bartolomé de Las Casas in Literature in Film”) studies the role of literature, memory, and history in shaping the controversial legacies of well-known Latin American figures. Dr. Milacci has taught a wide variety of classes (both residential and online) at the different institutions he attended, including Spanish grammar and conversation, composition, culture, literature, business Spanish, and translation.

Verónica is Director of International Relations and Academic Cooperation Office at the Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina (UCA). Skilled in Research, Teaching, Higher Education, and Curriculum Development. Strong community and social services professional with a Doctor of Philosophy - PhD focused in Hispanic and Latin American Languages and Literatures, from University of Maryland College Park.

Kathryn is Lecturer at Towson University.

Julia Tomasini is a writer and literary translator from Buenos Aires and assistant director for academic programs at New York University-Buenos Aires. She completed her undergraduate degree at the Universidad de Buenos Aires before earning her MA in Latin American literature at the University of Maryland and her PhD at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, where she wrote her dissertation on the Brazilian novels of Argentinean writer Manuel Puig. As a translator, she works between Portuguese, French, English, and Spanish. She has taught courses in language, literature, cultural studies, and translation at several universities.

Kayla is Chair of the World Languages Department at Stratford Academy in Macon, GA