People

Jill Beckman

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

Amber Brian, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor
DEO, Spanish and Portuguese
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.
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Camila Núñez-Bergsneider

Title/Position
PhD Candidate, Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant, 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.
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Sofía Balbuena

Title/Position
Graduate Student, Masters of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing
Iowa Arts Fellow
Sofía Balbuena has a degree in Political Science from the Universidad de Buenos Aires, a MA in Literary Creation (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), and a MA in Comparative Literature from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She has worked as a bookseller, and a reader for publishing houses in Spain specializing in contemporary Latin American literature. Her book-length essay Doce pasos hacia mí was published in 2022 by the Argentina-based Vinilo.
Maria Jose Barbosa

Maria Jose Barbosa, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Professor Emeritus
Karen Barkauskas-Goering

Karen Barkauskas-Goering

Title/Position
PhD Candidate, Foreign Language and ESL Education
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish
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Diana Carolina Camberos

Title/Position
Graduate Student and Teaching Assistant, Spanish
Diana Camberos is a second-year Masters student in the Spanish Linguistics program. Diana received a Bachelor of Arts in Global Health Studies and Spanish from the University of Iowa in 2020. Diana is part of the 2023-2024 Spanish Heritage Speakers in the Classroom working group for the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Diana and professor Dr. Claudia Pozzobon Potratz run an informal, conversational group for Spanish heritage speakers, Club Bilingüe. Diana’s research interests are: ● Spanish heritage language education ● Identity ideology ● Heritage language pedagogy ● U.S. Spanish ● Sociolinguistics Courses taught: SPAN:1001 Elementary Spanish I SPAN:1002 Elementary Spanish II SPAN:1502 Intermediate Spanish II
Horacio Castellanos

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). He has also taught in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh. In 2009, he was guest researcher at the University of Tokyo with a fellowship granted by the Japan Foundation.
Gillian Cochrane

Gillian Cochrane

Title/Position
Adjunct Instructor
young man with longish brown hair and beard wearing glasses and white shirt in front of gray wall

Erick Cortes Parra

Title/Position
Graduate Student, Sports and Recreation Management
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish
Emerson Craig

Emerson Craig

Title/Position
PhD Candidate, Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish
PhD Student, Teaching Assistant in Spanish
Roxanna Curto

Roxanna Curto, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor
DEO, French and Italian
Roxanna Curto is Chair of the Department of French and Italian and Associate Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa.
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Oriette D'Angelo

Title/Position
PhD Candidate, Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant, 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. 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); Inquietud (Digo.palabra.txt, 2021); and Cardiopatías (Monte Ávila Editores, 2016), which obtained the Premio para Obras de Autores Inéditos. She also compiled the book Amanecimos sobre la palabra (Team Poetero Ediciones, 2017) about young Venezuelan poets. In 2022, she was awarded with the Stephen Lynn Smith Memorial Scholarship for Social Justice granted by the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on the representations of political and personal trauma in contemporary Chilean literature. 
Camila de Urioste Laborde

Camila de Urioste Laborde

Title/Position
Graduate Student, Masters of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish
MFA in Spanish Creative Writing Student, Teaching Assistant in Spanish
George DeMello

George DeMello, Ph.D.

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

Walter Dobrian, Ph.D.

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

R. Thomas Douglass, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor Emeritus
Maria Duarte

Maria Duarte, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor Emeritus
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Karina Escobedo

Title/Position
Academic Program Management Associate
Course Management for Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Department of Linguistics, Department of German, Latin American Studies Program, and International Studies Program Graduate Coordinator for Spanish, Spanish Creative Writing, and Linguistics
Ana Fernandez

Ana Esther Fernández

Title/Position
Lecturer
Ana E. Fernández Bravo has been teaching at the University of Iowa for more than 20 years. Her current on-campus classes include Spanish Language Skills: Speaking and the course she created, Medical Spanish in Contemporary Society. Ana is also the organizer of the series “Talks About Medicine in Spanish” and the conversation event “Cafecito Cervantes.” In 2021, she received the CLAS Collegiate Teaching Award.
Sofia Fernandez Echeverri

Sofia Fernandez Echeverri

Title/Position
Graduate Student in Art
Denise Filios

Denise Filios, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Associate Professor
Denise K. Filios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. She enjoys teaching courses about such topics as Fitness cultures in Spain, the Music of the Hispanic world, and medieval Iberian literature and culture. She is the author of Performing Women in the Middle Ages: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian Lyric. Her current research studies the Camino de Santiago and other medieval-based long-distance walking routes and cultural itineraries in Spain.
Roslyn Frank

Roslyn Frank, Ph.D.

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

Meredith Mahy Gall, M.S.

Title/Position
Senior Academic Advisor, Division of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
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.
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Nicolas Gerardi

Title/Position
Graduate Student, Masters of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish
Brian Gollnick

Brian Gollnick, Ph.D.

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. He is particularly concerned with the interactions between cultures and with how cultural expression relates to social justice. These interests also influence his teaching, which aims to expose students to historical perspectives through objects of study including music, film, art, and literary texts. The study of literature forms part of a Liberal Arts education aimed at helping students find new interests and encouraging the skills and passions necessary for a life of sustained learning and development.
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Claudia Gomez Molina

Title/Position
Graduate Student, Masters of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing
Iowa Arts Fellow
Becky Gonzalez

Becky Gonzalez, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Assistant Professor
Honors Advisor
Director, Multilingual Syntax Lab
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. Her research combines theoretical and experimental approaches and she works predominantly with speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
Jose Guardiola Guaderrama

Jose Guardiola Guaderrama

Title/Position
Graduate Student, Masters of Fine Arts in Spanish Creative Writing
Oscar Hahn

Oscar Hahn, Ph.D.

Title/Position
Professor Emeritus