People

Jill Beckman, Ph.D.
Title/Position
Director, Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Associate Professor
Dr. Jill Beckman is the Director of the Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (DWLLC) and Associate Professor of Linguistics.

Amber Brian, PhD
Title/Position
Departmental Executive Officer
Associate Professor
Amber Brian is Associate Professor of Latin American literary and cultural studies and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Her primary areas of research are colonialism and historiography, Indigenous intellectual history, and translation studies.

Camila Núñez-Bergsneider
Title/Position
PhD Candidate in Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant in Spanish
Camila Núñez-Bergsneider is a Historian with a master's in Art History. Her main interest is comics studies, focussing on comic books or graphic novels that propose an alternative approach to History, Memory and the construction of individual and collective identities. Currently she's a T.A. at the Spanish and Portuguese Department and a Spanish Literatures PhD Student.

Lis Arevalo Hidalgo
Lis Arevalo Hidalgo is a graduate student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa.

Maria Jose Barbosa, PhD
Title/Position
Professor Emeritus

Karen Barkauskas-Goering
Title/Position
PhD Candidate, Foreign Language and ESL Education
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish

Nicolas Bohorquez
Nicolas Bohorquez is a graduate student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa.

Miguel Carpio
Miguel Carpio is a graduate student in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa.

Horacio Castellanos
Title/Position
Associate Professor
Horacio Castellanos Moya is a writer and a journalist from El Salvador. For two decades he worked as editor of news agencies, magazines and newspapers in Mexico, Guatemala and his own country. As a fiction writer, he was granted residencies in a program supported by the Frankfurt International Book Fair (2004-2006) and in the City of Asylum program in Pittsburgh (2006-2008).

Emerson Craig
Title/Position
PhD Candidate in Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant in Spanish
Emerson Craig is a PhD Student and Graduate Assistant at the University of Iowa.

Roxanna Curto, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor
Roxanna Curto is Associate Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. She received her PhD in French from Yale in 2008 and her AB in Romance Studies from Harvard in 2001.

Oriette D'Angelo
Title/Position
PhD Candidate in Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant in Spanish
Oriette D'Angelo is a PhD Candidate in Spanish with a Graduate Certificate in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. She holds an MFA in Spanish Creative Writing from the University of Iowa and a masters in Digital Communications and Media Arts from DePaul University, Chicago. She is the founder and director of the literary magazine Digo.palabra.txt and the web-research project #PoetasVenezolanas. Author of the poetry books En mi boca se abrirá la noche (Libero Editorial, 2023); Pájaro que muerde. Diario de Iowa, 2018-2019 (LP5 Editora, 2022); and Cardiopatías (Monte Ávila Editores, 2016; Winner of the Premio para Autores Inéditos by Monte Ávila Editores, 2014. Translated into English by Lupita Eyde-Tucker as Homeland of Swarms and published by co.im.press in 2024). She also compiled the book Amanecimos sobre la palabra (Team Poetero Ediciones, 2017) about young Venezuelan poets. In 2022, she was awarded the Stephen Lynn Smith Memorial Scholarship for Social Justice granted by the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on political and personal trauma representations in contemporary Latin American literature.

George DeMello, PhD
Title/Position
Professor Emeritus
George DeMello is Professor Emeritus of Spanish at the University of Iowa. A dialectologist with a primary interest in contemporary Spanish American syntax, his principle area of research involves describing certain syntactical areas as they function throughout the Spanish American world. His approach is corpus-based, and his primary corpus is the fifteen volumes of transcriptions of in-situ tape recordings produced by the Norma Culta Project.

Walter Dobrian, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor Emeritus
Walter A. Dobrian is Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, specializing in Spanish poetry 1700-present, 20th-century drama, and Spanish cinema as it relates to literature.

R. Thomas Douglass, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor Emeritus
R. Thomas Douglass is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa.

Maria Duarte, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor Emeritus
Maria Duarte is an associate professor emeritus at the University of Iowa.

Ana Esther Fernández
Title/Position
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Ana E. Fernández Bravo has been teaching at the University of Iowa for more than 20 years.

Denise Filios, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Study Abroad Advisor
Denise K. Filios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Her current research studies the Camino de Santiago and other medieval-based long-distance walking routes and cultural itineraries in Spain.

Roslyn Frank, PhD
Title/Position
Professor Emeritus
Roslyn M. Frank is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, specializing in Basque Studies, Cognitive Linguistics, European ethnography, ethnomathematics, ethno- & archaeo- astronomy, informational technologies & orality, ecocriticism, Spanish civilization & Culture and Spanish Women Writers.

Meredith Mahy Gall, MS
Title/Position
Senior Academic Advisor
Meredith Mahy Gall is the senior academic advisor for the Division of World Literatures, Languages, and Cultures (including all world languages, International Studies, linguistics, and translation) and global health studies students.

Santiago Giralt
Santiago Giralt is a graduate student at the University of Iowa.

Brian Gollnick, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor
Director, Latin American Studies Program
Brian Gollnick works on modern Mexican and Latin American cultural history from a perspective broadly influenced by the thinking of Antonio Gramsci.

Becky Gonzalez, PhD
Title/Position
Assistant Professor
Honors Advisor
Multilingual Syntax Lab Director
Becky Gonzalez is a linguist specializing in multilingual language acquisition. She works in the area of syntax, with a focus on argument structure, and is especially interested in the factors (linguistic and non-linguistic) that influence linguistic outcomes in different types of multilinguals.

Oscar Hahn, PhD
Title/Position
Professor Emeritus

Charles A. Hale
Title/Position
Professor
Professor Charles A. Hale, a specialist in Latin American history, was a faculty member at The University of Iowa from 1966 to 1997.
Rachel Hart
Title/Position
Graduate Student in Spanish
Rachel Hart is a graduate student in the field of Spanish at the University of Iowa.

Alan Javier Valdez
Alan Javier Valdez is a graduate student at the University of Iowa.

Alexis Jimenez, PhD
Title/Position
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Alexis Jimenez is an Assistant Professor of Instruction within the field of Spanish at the University of Iowa.

Paula Kempchinsky, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor
Paula Kempchinsky (1954-2021), Associate Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, was born on August 11, 1954. Paula grew up in Freeland, Pennsylvania and attended East Stroudsburg State College. She graduated with a dual major in Spanish and history and a certification to teach social studies. Paula received her MA from the University of Minnesota in Spanish literature and then moved to Los Angeles to start her PhD at UCLA in Romance Linguistics.

Philip Klein, PhD
Title/Position
Associate Professor Emeritus
Philip W. Klein is Associate Professor Emeritus of Spanish grammar and linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa, with publications in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pedagogy and computer applications.
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