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.
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
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.
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
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. 
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
Ana Fernandez

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. 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.
Denise Filios

Denise Filios, Ph.D.

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. 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.
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.
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
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Rachel Hart

Title/Position
Graduate Student in Spanish
Javier Hernandez

Javier Hernandez

Title/Position
PhD Candidate, Spanish
Graduate Teaching Assistant, Spanish
PhD Student, Teaching Assistant in Spanish
Ryann Hubbart

Ryann Hubbart

Title/Position
Administrative Services Specialist
Alexis Jimenez

Alexis Jimenez, PhD

Title/Position
Assistant Professor of Instruction