Clara Burgo
Advisor: Richard Cameron.
Dissertation title: Tense and Aspect Grammaticalization in Bilbao Spanish.
This is a variationist study of the grammaticalization of the present perfect in Bilbao Spanish in hodiernal and prehodiernal contexts across three social variables: age, social class, and gender. A curvilinear pattern would point to a change in progress, which would support previous research conducted in other Spanish cities.

Eugenio Di Stefano
Advisor: Margarita Saona.
Dissertation title: Cultural representations of torture in the Southern Cone.
Comparative literature and theory. Early 20th-century American literature and contemporary Latin American literature, specifically Uruguayan and Chilean testimonios. Transhemispheric literary and cultural studies; representations of torture, disability, and race.

Jill Jegerski
Advisor: Bill VanPatten (Texas Tech University).
Dissertation title:
Testing the Limits of Adult Second Language Acquisition:
A Psycholinguistic Study of Near-native Syntactic Processing
The issue of whether adults can ever completely acquire a second language is of fundamental importance to the field of second language acquisition(SLA). This dissertation draws on previous investigation from two distinct disciplines, examining this critical SLA issue of native-like attainment from a psycholinguistic sentence processing perspective. The performance of near-native speakers of Spanish will be compared to that of monolingual native speakers in a self-paced reading experiment measuring five different types of syntactic processing, the selection of which is motivated by both SLA and processing research. Reading time results will be reported and analyzed statistically for individual near-native participants as well as for the group. Crucially, the testing of several processing behaviors within one experiment will provide a broad profile of near-native processing and of grammatical processing in general, so the results will be widely generalizable.

Research Interests: Second language grammatical processing and parsing, native language and bilingual processing, eye-tracking, heritage language development.

Diana González-Cameron
Advisor: Margarita Saona
Dissertation topic (working title): Hysteria: A Mechanism for Self-expression and Survival in the Works of Contemporary Caribbean and Latino-Caribbean Women Authors
Historically, hysteria has been seen as a disease with a flair for dramatics affecting mostly women. Today, however, as Mark Micale states, hysteria is being reexamined as “an alternative physical, verbal, and gestural language, an iconic social communication narrative,” which poses fundamental questions about gender, culture, language, narrative and representation. This thesis will examine the presence of hysteria in the works of selected contemporary Puerto Rican and Latino-Caribbean writers. Questions of class, race, culture, and politics, and how these intersect with hysteria will be explored in conjunction with a psychoanalytical theoretical framework. The analysis of hysteria in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Cixous, and other theorists such as Elaine Showalter, Diane Hunter and others will provide the underlying support in understanding why hysteria appears in these authors and their works, and what is its function.

Javier García Montes
Advisors: Matthew Marr, Dianna Niebylski
Dissertation Topic (working title): Silencio, ética e identidad en la novela contemporánea española.
This dissertation compares several contemporary Spanish novels that privilege the importance of identity in a poetics of denouncement that seeks to counter the specter of socio-political silence which has characterized much recent Peninsular narrative. Starting from the premise that—in the wake of poststructuralist critiques of the self—modern subjectivity can only be reworked through ethics (with emphasis placed on the crucial role that responsibility plays therein), this study examines the repercussions for a subject’s sense of inner stability when he or she is immersed in a culture of social silence condoned by the community with which he or she most closely identifies. In a number of contemporary Spanish novels, the representation of this situation emerges as a discursive means of refuting such scenarios, as well as the strain of simulation logic that works to perpetuate them. In this sense, the novels in question find a standpoint from which to recover the moral character of literature, and to challenge, consequently, the passive and commercial role adopted by much Spanish fiction in the last quarter of twentieth century. Authors studied include Miguel Sánchez-Ostiz, Gustavo Martín Garzo, Antonio Muñoz Molina, and Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

Jennifer Domino Rudolph
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
Dissertation title: Los hombres nunca se rajan: Racialization, Redemption and Latino Masculinities
This dissertation explores the diverse notions of masculinity in U.S. Latino cultures as they intersect with race and racialization. If Latino men have been constructed as foreign, violent, and without redemption by US dominant society, the cultural texts (fiction, music and film) that I analyze shed light on self-constructions of manhood from within the community, thus enhancing our understanding of the intersection of racialization and redemption in Latinos’ formation of their own identities.

Jelena Sánchez
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Secondary advisor: Anne Cruz (University of Miami)
Dissertation title: Las tramoyeras: A New Age of Women in the Spanish Seventeenth-Century comedia de capa y espada plays.
Women as subject in early 17th-century comedia de capa y espada plays. The search for cultural nuances of female subjectivity in the commercial popular theater of Madrid. My aim is to forge a new classification of the female protagonist in comedia de capa y espada plays. Works analyzed include plays by Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, and María de Zayas.

Montserrat Pérez-Toribio
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Dissertation title: Profession, Occupation, Vocation or Duty: Economic Discourses of Woman’s Work in Golden Age Spanish Literature.
My dissertation examines how women and their relationship to labor are depicted in early modern Spanish cultural products. I analyze how female characters are portrayed as perceiving and performing their functions and roles as workers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The analysis centers upon the way in which working female characters act according to a new way of understanding economic and social relationships, which drives them to promote new modes of labor and remuneration.
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Ph.D. Students

Zurine Alonso
Advisor: Rafael Nunez-Cedeno
Formal approaches to second language acquisition.

Tim Anderson
Advisor: Luis López
Theoretical and descriptive linguistics, in particular semantics of natural language; analytic philosophy of language, in particular the work of John Searle; history of the Spanish language.

Clara Azevedo
Advisor: Luis Lopez
Second language acquisition

David Beltrán
Advisor: Matthew Marr
20th and 21st-century Spanish narrative, focusing on transnational perspectives of the American city and identity constructions through collected/collective memory; 20th-century Latin American narrative; comparative literature; critical analysis of cultural theory and popular culture found in digital game narratives.

Steve Buttes
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
20th-century and contemporary Latin American literature and culture, especially the Southern Cone and Mexico; comparative literature (U.S.-Latin America); studies of modernity and postmodernity; literary theory and philosophy; nationalism and representations of poverty, labor relations, and occupational culture.


Susana Domingo Amestoy
Advisor: Margarita Saona
Late twentieth-century Latin American novel and peninsular cinema; the liminal friction between marginalized and the globalized identities within and beyond the nation-state; the theoretical limits of transculturation and its application within a contemporary context; European immigration policy and the construction of supra-national subjectivities; Paris and other European cities as dystopic objects of Latin American desire within literature and film.

Andrea Castelluccio
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Latinoamerican literature and film with special focus on Argentina.

Clarissa Ewald
Advisor: Kay Gonzalez
Second language acquisition.

Luz Bibiana Fuentes
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
Latinoamerican literatures and literary theory.

Lillian Gorman
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
US Latino and Latinoamerican literature. Heritage language maintenance.

Raúl D. Gutiérrez
Advisors: Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera and Margarita Saona.
Border literature and music created amid the México-U.S. borderlands; the role that abject poverty, identity, gender, political, and economical structures play in the creation of a border in literary texts and music, both in the United States and México; the representation of “el mestizo” and the hybridism in contemporary Latin American literature, especially Mexican literature; the uses of indigenous knowledge and traditions in both contemporary Mexican-American and Mexican art and literature.

Clara E. Herrera
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Dissertation title: Estudio de la escritura femenina autobiográfica en el Nuevo Reino de Granada basado en la autobiografía espiritual de la Madre Josefa del Castillo y la Madre Jerónima Nava y Saavedra.
The purpose of this dissertation is to study the autobiographical writings of the Colombian colonial nuns, Madre Josefa del Castillo y Madre Jerónima Nava, in relation to the models of mystic and autobiographical writing they imitated, and with specific reference to the socio-historical context of Nueva Granada. The dissertation will contemplate the development of the conventual’s milieu in Nueva Granada, the lives and writings of the two nuns from a socio-historical perspective, as well as the innovations and particularities of their works.

Melissa Huerta
Advisor: Frances Aparicio
US Latino and Latinoamerican literature.

Caroline Kopel
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Interests: post-dictatorship female identity in the Cono Sur; relationship between public (nation-imposed) and private female identity, 20th and 21st-century Latin American visual arts, especially representations of the nation; the erotic in female writing; Latin American short story; the micro-cuento; 20th and 21st-century Latin American and Spanish cinema; feminist theory; post-colonial novels of the Caribbean; female political initiatives in
Latin America; immigration movements between, to, and from Latin American and Spain; pop culture; female identity possibilities and story formulas in Latin American telenovelas.

Janine Matts
Advisor: Kim Potowski
Spanish-English bilingualism, more specifically code-switching. The social and pragmatic motivations for inter- and intrasentential switches. Comparing and contrasting code-switching patterns in Mexican and Puerto Rican communities in Chicago. Following the work of Poplack, Myers-Scotten, Wei, and Auer.

Martín Ponti
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
The construction of a political voice-discourse in women’s melodramatic folletín of the early 20th century and its influence on Argentinean political speeches of the period.

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M.A. Students

Junice Acosta
Advisor: Rafael Nunez
Caribbean linguistics with focus on phonology.

Laura Bartlett
Advisor: Luis Lopez
Second language acquisition, especially cognitive approaches; formulaic sequences in language development; the role of feedback and salience in first and second language learning; code-switching in bilingual and multilingual children.

Elsa Camargo
Advisor: Cristian Roa
Latinoamerican literature with focus on the Colonial period.

Chris Cashman
Advisor: Kay Gonzalez
Bilingual grammars.

Chris Coleman
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
Latinoamerican literature and contermporary philosophy

Sarah Downey-Gimenez
Advisor: Kay Gonzalez
Theoretical linguistics.

Shane Ebert
Advisor: Luis Lopez
Second Language Acquisition (e.g., What are the fundamental differences, if any, between the L1 and L2 language systems and what might that tell us about languages in general?); Foreign/Second Language Pedagogy (e.g., The application of linguistic theory versus general cognitive processes to pedagogical practices); Bilingualism (How multiple languages in the brain affect each other); and code-switching (Is it primarily due to intra- or extralinguistic factors?).

Mandy Faretta
Advisor: Kim Potowski
Second language acquisition and bilingualism.

Xabier Granja-Ibarretxe
Advisor: Rosilie Hernandez
Peninsular literature

Jeanne Heil
Advisor: Luis Lopez
Theoretical linguistics.

Carolina López-Lozano
Advisor: Cristián Roa-de-la-Carrera
Contemporary Spanish Literature, specially from the 1960 to present, focusing on topics of memory, identity and culture. The influence of cinema and music in this kind of literature.

Mónica Márquez
Advisor: Luis López Carretero
Interests: Hispanic Linguistics, Latin American dialectology, México and mexican culture, Spanish and Latin American films.

Idoia Martínez-del-Mozo
Advisor: Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro
Women writers of the 20th-21st centuries. In particular, Latin American women writers who, at some stage of their lives, underwent a migration experience. The area of interest is not reduced to how this experience influenced their writing, but considers as well the reception of their works in the United States.

Stephanie Navarro
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Contemporary literature in Spain and Latinoamerica.

Paola Olsen
Advisor: Rafael Núñez-Cedeño
Hispanic Linguistics (Syntax, Phonetics & Morphology). Latin American Dialectology, Costa Rican dialect (intonation). Multiple Language Acquisition in children from multilingual families.

Rafael Ortiz
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
Contemporary Latinamerican literature.

Paloma Rodríguez
Advisor: Dianna Niebylski
19th and 20th-century Latin American literature. Combining her backgrounds in literature and communications/advertising she would like to explore the influence of image in contemporary works.

Octavian Stinga
Advisor: Gabriel Riera
Contemporary literature and literary theory.

Lesley Summers
Advisor: Kim Potowski
Sociolinguistics of heritage language maintenance.

Anna Taranenko
Advisor: Kay Gonzalez-Vilbazo
Sociolinguistics, language use in different social and political contexts, relationship between language and social factors, such as class and ethnicity; research into bicultural patterns, rules governing conversation; interdisciplinary research in the spheres of Hispanic Studies and International Relations.

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