Faculty

Remy Attig grew up speaking Spanish and English and lived for over a decade in French-English bilingual contexts in Canada. This life experience informs his interest in the way that bilingual and multilingual identities are navigated and expressed and how they are (mis)understood by monolinguals. His research focuses on Spanglish, Judeo-Spanish, and Portuñol speakers, their cultural production, and the translation of these identities for the larger societies in which the speakers live. Remy draws from postcolonial and queer theories in Translation Studies, Sociolinguistics, and Cultural Studies to explore activist and social justice movements in these communities. His work is descriptive, theoretical, and creative in nature. He invites graduate students interested in bilingual/multilingual communities or the practice and theory of translation from a variety of angles.
Recent Publications:

• “Intralingual Translation as an Option for Radical Spanglish” – TranscUlturAl: A Journal of Translation and Cultural Studies – Vol. 11 No. 1, 2019, pp. 22-34. DOI: 10.21992/tc29448
• “Coco and the Case of the Disappearing Spanglish: Negotiating Code-Switching in the English and Spanish Versions of Disney and Pixar’s Animated Film” in Hybrid Englishes and the Challenge of/for Translation: Identity, Mobility and Language Change. Edited by Karen Bennett and Rita Queiroz de Barros. London: Routledge, 2019, pp. 151-162. DOI: 10.4324/9781315142333-9
• For more articles or an updated CV consult: https://bgsu.academia.edu/RemyAttig

Francisco Cabanillas (B.A. in Philosophy; Ph.D. in Literature) has been teaching Spanish, Latin American/Caribbean/Latinx culture and literature at BGSU since 1991. Currently, he is the undergraduate Arts and Sciences Advisor. Teaching and research interests include Nuyorican Poetry and Culture, Food in Latin America, Latin American Modern Art, Modernity-Coloniality. His collection of essays, Pedreira nunca hizo esto (2007), received the 2006 book award (Essay) by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture. His forthcoming collection of essays, Espina que esputa libertad (2020), contains a selection of 21 essays published by El Post Antillano (an electronic newspaper) from 2015 t0 2019.

Recent publications:

• “Tres en uno: creacionismo, transgénicos y cambio climático.” Revista Cruce, Universidad Metropolitana, Cupey, Puerto Rico, 22 de abril, 2020. https://issuu.com/revistacruce/docs/22_de_abril_2020__planeta_tierra
• “Pioneros del arte moderno latinoamericano: Rivera, Torres-García, Lam y Matta.” Lo que somos, 7 de junio, 2020. http://loquesomos.org/pioneros-del-arte-moderno-latinoamericano-rivera-torres-garcia-lam-y-matta/
• “Hambre: entre la novela y la poesía de Rafael Acevedo.” El Post Antillano, 14 de mayo, 2020. http://elpostantillano.net/cultura/24917-francisco-cabanillas.html

Cynthia Ducar (PH.D. Second Language Acquisition and Teaching, University of Arizona) has been teaching Spanish at BGSU for over a decade. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Applied Linguistics, Hispanic Sociolinguistics and Heritage Language Pedagogy. She has published articles and presented in national and international conferences on sociolinguistic concerns in the heritage language classroom, as well as issues related to the role of attitude and motivation in the Spanish heritage language context. Her works have been published in Foreign Language Annals, The Heritage Language Journal as well as in the Beaudrie & Fairclough’s edited volume titled Spanish as a Heritage Language in the US: State of the Science. She, along with Sara Beaudrie & Kim Potowski, co-authored Heritage Language Teaching: Research & Practice, published by McGraw Hill. When not engaged in scholarly activities, she enjoys spending time with her family and traveling.

Recent Publications:

• Burke, B. & Ducar, C. (2018) Curriculum and instruction under construction: Improving undergraduate world language education through professional learning communities. The Language Educator, 13(3): 41-48.
• Ducar, C. & Schocket, D. (2018) Machine translation and the L2 classroom: Pedagogical solutions for making peace with Google translate. Foreign Language Annals, 51(4): 779-795.
• Beaudrie, S., Ducar, C. & Potowski, K. (2014) Heritage Language Teaching: From Research to Practice. McGraw Hill.

Carles Ferrando Valero holds a B.A. in Humanities (Pompeu Fabra University), an M.A. in Cultural Studies (University of Barcelona), an M.A. in Hispanic Literatures (University of Illinois), and a Ph.D. in Spanish and Spanish-American Literatures (University of Colorado). His research focuses on modern Iberian literature and visual culture, and his scholarly interests include transnational modernism, intellectual history, new media and technology, and the dialectics between politics and cultural production. His articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, Hispanic Review and Modernism/modernity. He is currently at work on a book manuscript on literature and large technological systems in modern Spain. Read some of his work at bgsu.academia.edu/CarlesFerrandoValero

Selected publications:

• “Haptic Vision in Spanish Modernism: An Account of Sensibilities in Transnational Contact.” Modernism/modernity 28.1 (2021): 25-46
• “Automobility and the Politics of Development under Miguel Primo de Rivera: A Historicized Reading of Antonio Espina’s Luna de copas.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 21:3 (2020): 335-52
• El marido, la mujer y la sombra. By Mario Verdaguer. Ed. and introduction by Carles Ferrando Valero. Madrid: Calambur, 2020.
  
   

Dr. Valeria Grinberg Pla is a literary, cultural and film critic from Buenos Aires, Argentina, who like many other Latinxs has moved to the United States. Since 2006 she is a Professor of Spanish at BGSU. She teaches classes that reflect her research interests on violence representation in Latin American literature and film, on the appropriation of crime fiction and noir aesthetics in Latin America and the Caribbean, on literary and film strategies to think about war and dictatorship trauma in Central America, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, and on the Panafrican, transnational literary movements of the Afro-Caribbean populations of Central America. She has also developed a service-learning class to learn not just about, but rather from and with the Latino/a/x community in the area.

Recent Publications:  

• La (re)escritura de la historia en la narrativa centroamericana
  
• Cárcel de árboles de Rodrigo Rey Rosa: la literatura como esperanza 
• Against Anomie. Julio Hernández Cordón’s Post-War Trilogy: Gasolina/ Gasoline (2008), Las marimbas del infierno/ The Marimbas of Hell (2010) and Polvo/ Dust (2012)

Susana Juarez (Ph.D. English Philology, University of Alcala, Spain; M.A. in Spanish, Bowling Green State University) has been teaching Spanish at BGSU for the past 20 years. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in Spanish Grammar, Writing and Conversation. As the resident director for the Academic Year Abroad Program in Spain, her responsibilities are both administrative and educational. She also maintains and strengthens professional relationships with American and Spanish institutions such as the US Embassy in Madrid, The Association of North American University Programs in Spain, for which she acted as executive president for four years. Her main objective is helping students stretch, both academically and personally, while studying abroad. When not engaged in scholar activities, she loves spending time with animals, more specifically she does volunteer work with abandoned/abused dogs at an animal shelter.

Lynn Pearson (Ph.D. Iberomance Philology and Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin) teaches graduate courses in Hispanic Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, and World Language Teaching Methodology. She has presented papers on interlanguage pragmatics, discourse analysis, teacher education, and language learning communities at national and international conferences. She has authored or co-authored refereed journal and proceedings articles in Hispania, the Modern Language Journal, Foreign Language Annals, System, and Pragmatics and Language Learning. In addition, she contributed chapters as co-author or sole author to the following volumes: Spanish Second Language Acquisition: The State of the Science (Georgetown University Press), L2 Spanish Pragmatics: From Research to Teaching (Routledge), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching, and The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics.

Recent publications:

• Koike, D., & Pearson, L. (2018). Pragmatics. In J. Muñoz Basols, E. Gironzetti, & M. Lacorte (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Language Teaching: Metodologías, contextos y recursos para la enseñanza del español L2 (pp. 348-361). London: Routledge.
• Pearson, L. (2018). Pragmatics instruction in second language at the novice level: Creating meaningful contexts for the acquisition of grammatical forms. In D. Dumitrescu & P. Andueza (eds.), L2 Spanish Pragmatics: Learning and teaching (pp. 214-231). New York: Routledge.
• Pearson, L., & Hasler-Barker, M. (2020). Second language acquisition of Spanish pragmatics. In D. Koike & J. C. Felix-Brasdefer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Spanish Pragmatics (pp. 423-439). London: Routledge.

Amy Robinson has been teaching at BGSU since 2003 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on Mexican literature and culture from the nineteenth century to the present with a special focus on outlaws, revolutionaries, recalcitrant women, and other types of rebellious characters. She enjoys teaching novels, films and plays in upper-level courses, and she is always appreciative of her students’ enthusiasm for favorites like Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and any work about Mexico’s legendary social bandit known as Chucho el Roto. Her recent publications are available here. A participant in the NEH-funded Black Swamp Learning Community (2018-19) that brings together interdisciplinary approaches to reflect on local and global sustainability issues, her interests also include analyzing social struggle with regards to environmental (in)justice.