About us

My name is Sara Fernández Cuenca and I am an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, NC. I grew up monolingual in the south of Spain but I was always interested in languages and North American culture. I learned English from music and when l completed my undergraduate degree in English Philology at the University of Seville.

I moved to the US in 2011 with a scholarship to teach Spanish at the University of Michigan and I enjoyed it so much that I decided to pursue an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago and later a Ph.D. with a concentration in Second Language Acquisition Teacher Education, at the Champaign-Urbana campus. Besides the US and Spain I have lived in France, Scotland, and Germany for short periods of time. I met my husband who was raised bilingual French and English during my study abroad in Germany. We currently reside in the US and are raising our two children (Lucas and Noémie) trilingual (English/French/Spanish). So far it has been a very gratifying experience!

I have been teaching Spanish in higher education for almost 9 years. Some of my favorite courses to teach are Bilingualism in the Spanish-speaking World and The Spanish of the US. In my free time, I love cooking, watching reality TV, and practicing yoga.

My name is Lauren Miller, and I am a Spanish professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, where I live with my husband, César, my daughter, Victoria, and my son, Gonzalo. Despite growing up in a monolingual household in St. Louis, I learned Spanish from Hispanic friends I met working at a restaurant in high school. At the University of Oklahoma, I completed a Bachelor of Science degree in Foreign Language Education and studied abroad for two semesters at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid in addition to a summer at the Universidad Alcalá de Henares, just outside Madrid. I became a certified K-12 Spanish teacher in Oklahoma but decided to pursue graduate studies at Purdue University shortly after.

I completed both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics focusing on Bilingualism and Language Acquisition. At Purdue I met César, a fellow graduate student from Santander, Spain. After one year teaching in Arkansas, we moved to Winston-Salem.

I have taught Spanish at the elementary, middle, high school and university levels and have led after school programs for bilingual children to develop literacy in Spanish. I have also taught courses for World Language teachers at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. I am passionate about multilingualism, board games, cooking, Spanish wine, reggaetón, and terrible reality shows.