Julia is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the Spanish and Portuguese Department. She teaches Spanish for heritage speakers and linguistics at the University of Iowa. In addition, she is the supervisor of the intermediate Spanish courses at the GE CLAS Core.

Julia 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. Julia’s other areas of interest are the incorporation of community engagement in the curriculum of Spanish heritage speakers’ courses and invisible learning. (See the websites below to know more about her interests).

She has been the chair of the 5^th 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.

After joining the University in 2013, she has created four courses: SPAN 2005: Writing Global Spanish, SPAN 3000: Writing Skills for Heritage Speakers, SPAN 3092: Spanish in the Community and SPAN 1505: Accelerated Intermediate Spanish for Heritage Speakers. 

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/