Embedded Files
Dr. Diego Pascual y Cabo
University of Florida
Dr. Diego Pascual y Cabo is Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics and Director of the Spanish Heritage Language Program at the University of Florida. He writes, teaches, and speaks widely about the relationship among language acquisition and language change, teaching and learning, language identity and power.
His primary research interest is (Spanish) heritage speaker bilingualism. His work on this topic has appeared in leading academic journals such as Applied Linguistics, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Heritage Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, and International Review of Applied Linguistics (among others).
In 2014, he founded the Symposium on Spanish as a Heritage Language, which has since become an annual event in the field of heritage speaker bilingualism. In 2022, the symposium will be held at Florida State University.
He is the founder and Editor-in-chief of the Spanish Heritage Language journal, an international refereed journal co-published by the University of Florida Press and the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Studies at the University of Florida.
He has received a number of awards. Among these, the more notable being the 2021 University of Florida-College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Teaching Award, the 2017 Texas Tech University New Faculty Award, and the 2014 National Heritage Language Resource Center - Russ Campbell Young Scholar Award.
Dr. Kim Potowski
University of Illinois at Chicago
Dr. Kim Potowski is Professor of Hispanic linguistics in the Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a faculty affiliate in the Latin American and Latino Studies Program, the Department of Curriculum and Instruction, and in the Social Justice Initiative.
Since 2009 she has served as Editor of the journal Spanish in Context.
She is interested in the promotion of minority languages and multilingualism, particularly via elementary schooling. Her work focuses on Spanish in the United States, including factors that influence intergenerational language transmission, connections between language and identity, and heritage language education. Some of her recent research topics include: Language development in dual immersion schools; Mexican and Puerto Rican Spanish in Chicago, and the language and identity of mixed “Mexi-Rican” individuals; Teaching heritage languages, particularly Spanish in the U.S.; Spanish use in Chicago quinceañera celebrations; The use of “Spanglish” in commercially published greeting cards
Dr. Sandro Sessarego
University of Texas Austin
He is an Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He works primarily in the fields of contact linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax. The linguistic study of the Afro-Latino Vernaculars of the Americas (ALVAs) —the languages that developed in Latin America from the contact of African languages, Spanish and Portuguese in colonial times— and the sociohistorical analysis of their evolution have formed the main themes of his research program for the past fifteen years or so. In particular, his investigation combines linguistic, sociohistorical, legal and anthropological insights to cast light on the nature and origins of these contact varieties. Dr. Sessarego current interests also lie in the areas of legal history, human rights and language policy. Also his research aims at examining the status of unofficial languages to understand how language policy may have a social impact on ethnic and racial minorities, with a focus on speakers of Afro-Latino Vernaculars, Afro-American Vernacular English, creoles, indigenous languages, immigrants’ varieties and other unofficial languages in the Americas and Europe. Two projects he is eager to develop deal with the political, cultural and linguistic status of Ligurian dialects in Italy and Afro-Hispanic varieties in Latin America.
Dr. Lourdes Torres DePaul University
Professor Torres' research and teaching interests include sociolinguistics, Spanish in the U.S., and Queer Latin@ Literature. She is the author of Puerto Rican Discourse: A Sociolinguistic Study of a New York Suburb and co-editor of Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism and Tortilleras: Hispanic and the Latina Lesbian Expression. Recent articles are published in Literature and Education, KALFOU, and The Journal of Lesbian Studies. Professor Torres' book on Spanish language use in Chicago (with Kim Potowski) will be published next year and she is currently working on a history of LLEGO, a national Latino LGBTQ organization that ran from 1987 to 2004.
Page updated
Report abuse