Julia Oliver Rajan teaches Spanish for heritage speakers and a number of linguistic courses in this Department. She is from Puerto Rico and is currently working on a digital archive about the coffee zone’s dialect of her native island. This digital record called Del cafetal al futuro is subsidized by an Arts and Humanities Initiative Standard Grant, and by the Digital Arts and Humanities Research.  (Click on the websites below, to know more about this research and other projects).

Julia’s other areas of interest are the incorporation of community engagement in the curriculum of Spanish heritage speakers’ courses and invisible learning. She is also a committee member of the Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language and the editor of the 2016 Hispanic Studies Review special issue dedicated to “Spanish as a Heritage Language.”

Julia has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she also coordinated a federally funded project at the College of Education for bilingual children in the Chicago Public Schools.  She has taught at a variety of institutions prior to arriving at the University of Iowa.

http://juliaoliverajan.weebly.com/

Related websites:

Project summary:  Del cafetal al futuro/ From the Coffee Fields to the Future

https://www.lib.uiowa.edu/studio/project/coffeezones/

Coffee Zone: Del cafetal al futuro/ From the Coffee Fields to the Future

http://coffeezone.lib.uiowa.edu/

Aprendizaje invisible/ Invisible learning

http://www.aprendizajeinvisible.com/en/