2023
Cole Callen
Position: Postodoctoral Fellow, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities
Dissertation: Acquisition and maintenance of morphosyntactic variation: Differential object marking in Spanish-speaking children and Spanish-English bilinguals
Dissertation Director: Karen Miller
Emily Sterk
Position: Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow and Visiting Professor of Spanish, Haverford College
Dissertation: Foundational Whores: Sex Tourism Encounters in the Contemporary American Tropics
Dissertation Director: Judith Sierra-Rivera
Ibis Sierra Audivert
Position: Consortium for Faculty Diversity Fellow and Visiting Professor of Hispanic Studies, Davidson College
Dissertation: Desplazamientos culturales: Genealogías intelectuales en el neobarroco cuir latinoamericano
Dissertation Director: Krista Brune & Judith Sierra-Rivera
Jacqueline García Suárez
Position: Assistant Professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University
Dissertation: El cuerpo (des)enritmado: Rompiendo con la habituación a la violencia en Cuba y Puerto Rico
Dissertation Director: Marco Martínez & Judith Sierra-Rivera
Gustavo Herrera Díaz
Position: Assistant Professor of Romance Studies, Brandeis University
Dissertation: Cuando Eshú y Dionisio se encuentran. Mediaciones afrogriegas en Cuba y Brasil
Dissertation Director: Sarah J. Townsend
Juan Blázquez Cuena
Position: Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow of Spanish, Pennsylvania State University
Dissertation: La belleza del mal: actualizaciones modernistas (1890-1930) del mito de Don Juan en la literatura española
Dissertation Director: Matthew J. Marr
2022
Michelle McGowan
Position: Visiting Assistant Professor, Albright College
Dissertation: Fictional Bodies: Complicit and Complacent Subjects in Contemporary Chilean and Spanish Texts
Dissertation Director: Nicolás Fernández-Medina
Ricardo Andrade
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish, Dominican University
Dissertation: La ciudad sonora: Sonidos e itinerarios del espacio urbano colonial en la ficción histórica latinoamericana
Dissertation Director: John Ochoa
Ashley Pahis
Position: Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish, Pennsylvania State University
Dissertation: Thinking ahead: Predictive processsing of gramamtical mood in mono- and multilinguals
Dissertation Director: Karen Miller & Matthew Carlson
Lindsey Chandler
Position: Instructional Technology Specialist, Office of Digital Pedagogies and Initiatives, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State
Dissertation: Processing Novel Inflectional Morphology in L1 and L2 Spanish Reading
Dissertation Director: Matthew Carlson
Estilita Cassiani Obeso
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction, Northwestern University
Dissertation: Language variation and revitalization: plural marking in Palenquero creole
Dissertation Director: John Lipski
Sonya Trawick
Position: Data Scientist in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Office of Regulatory Affairs (ORA), Office of Enforcement and Import Operations, Division of Food Defense Targeting
Dissertation: Revisiting the Concept of “Triggering of Code-Switching”
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Maria Puscama
Position: Assistant Professor, University of Indiana — Bloomington
Dissertation: Semantic Network Development in Second Language Spanish and its Impact on Processing Skills
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias & Matthew Carlson
Trevor Bero
Position: Project Manager, National Artificial Intelligence Institute (US Dept of Veterans Affairs)
Dissertation: Spanish rhotic variation in Corozal Town, Belize
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Carlos Echeverria Arriagada
Position: Assistant Professor, Texas Tech University
Dissertation: Recomplementation between discourse and grammar: a syntactic investigation combining experimental and corpus methods
Dissertation Director: Rena Cacoullos
2021
Deyanira Sindy Moya Chaves
Position: Assistant Professor, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Colombia
Dissertation: Focus, contrast and conversation: A variationist study of “[Verb+ser+X]” constructions in Colombian Spanish
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Priscila Lopez-Beltran Forcada
Position: Research Project Manager in the Finance and Economics Programme at the Alan Turing Institute in London
Dissertation: Heritage speakers’ online processing of the Spanish subjunctive: A comprehensive usage-based study
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
2020
Isabel Deibel
Position: Polyglot/Linguist/Curriculum Designer, Duolingo
Dissertation: Language representations in the presence of a lexical-functional split: an experimental approach targeting the Quichua-Media Lengua-Spanish interface
Dissertation Director: John Lipski
Michael Johns
Position: Research Associate, Professional Track Faculty, Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS), University of Maryland
Dissertation: Integration in Codeswitching: What is it, how does it surface, and why?
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
Manuel Pulido-Azpíroz
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, Penn State
Dissertation: Desirable difficulties in learning multiword units in a second language: Exploring processing and retrieval through behavior and brain potentials
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
Anna Torres Cacoullos
Position: ACLS/DRIVE Postdoctoral Fellowship in Humanities-Based Data Studies and Digital/Social Transformation, the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Dissertation: Writing with Cinema: Facing the Screen and Page in Modernist Spain (1920-1930)
Dissertation Director: Nicolás Fernández-Medina
2019
Anne Beatty-Martínez
Position: Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego
Dissertation: Revisiting masculine and feminine grammatical gender in Spanish: Evidence from event-related potentials and eye-movements
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
Alex McAllister
Position: Assistant Teaching Professor, Penn State
Dissertation: Perceptual learning in bilingual Spanish-English populations: Does experience matter?
Dissertation Director: Matthew T. Carlson
Position: Lecturer of Spanish, Loyola University Maryland
Dissertation: Moving through Modern Spain (1888-1923): Revelatory Darkness as Critical Medium
Dissertation Director: Nicolás Fernandéz-Medina
2018
Grant Berry
Position: Technical Program Manager, Amazon
Dissertation: Liminal voices, central constraints: Minority adoption of majority sound change
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Joshua Deckman
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latino Studies, Marywood University
Dissertation: The poetics and politics of pain: Decolonial spirituality in the Afro-Caribbean and its diaspora
Dissertation Director: Judith Sierra-Rivera
Position: Assistant Professor, University of Montana
Dissertation: The subjunctive in New Mexican Spanish: Maintenance in the face of language contact
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Position: Language Engineer, Amazon Web Services
Dissertation: The prosodic-syntactic structure of intra-sentential multi-word code-switching in the New Mexico Spanish-English bilingual community
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
2017
Nicole Benevento
Position: Associate Director of Articulation and Assessment at USC Dornsife Language Center, University of Southern California
Dissertation: Investigating prosodic prominence in spoken New Mexican Spanish
Dissertation Director: John Lipski
Christopher Champi
Position: Spanish Instructor at the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics
Dissertation: First and second singular subject pronoun expression in Dominican Spanish: The structure and acquisition of variable forms
Dissertation Director: Karen Miller
Position: Assistant Professor of Instruction, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Temple University
Dissertation: The Theater of Futures Past: Infrastructures of the Latin American Avant-Garde
Dissertation Director: Sarah J. Townsend
Position: Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish and Director of Engaged Scholarship, Penn State
Dissertation: Investigating community norms and linguistic mechanisms in codeswitching: Bridging linguistic theory and psycholinguistic experimentation
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
Dissertation: Adaptable Debility: Becoming Human Under Biocapitalism
Dissertation Director: John Ochoa
Position: Assistant Professor, Universidad de O’Higgins, Chile
Dissertation: A diachronic variationist approach to the study of subject pronoun expression in Spanish: first-person singular
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
2015
Ana Cortejoso de Andrés
Position: Profesora de Enseñana Secundaria de la Junta de Castilla y León (Spain), Lengua Castellana y Literatura, Instituto Emilio Ferrari
Dissertation: ” Mamá, quiero ser artista “: la problemática metaficcional del escritor hispano contemporáneo como celebridad global
Dissertation Director: Matthew J. Marr
Tomás Hidalgo Navas
Position: Assistant Teaching Professor, Brigham Young University
Dissertation: Killing the Father, Killing the Children: Dialogues on Political Violence between Mexican History, Novel, and Film (1959-2013)
Dissertation Director: Julia Cuervo-Hewitt
Position: Associate Professor of Spanish, College of DuPage
Dissertation: Framing the Nation: The Family as a Model for Nation Building in the Nineteenth-century Spanish American Novel
Dissertation Director: Julia Cuervo-Hewitt
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish, University of Texas, San Antonio
Dissertation: Direct object clitic placement preferences in Argentine Child Spanish
Dissertation Director: Karen Miller
2014
Colleen Balukas
Position: Assistant Professor, SUNY-Buffalo
Dissertation: The impact of code-switching and cognate status on phonetic realizations in the New Mexican Spanish-English bilingual community
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Amelia J. Dietrich
Position: Director for Research and Resources at The Forum on Education Abroad and Interim Editor of Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad
Dissertation: The role of probabilistic cues in L2 processing: Verb bias in Spanish and English
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
Position: Assistant Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders, University at Buffalo
Dissertation: Inconsistent Input and Amount of Exposure: Child Language Acquisition of Fering, a dialect of North Frisian
Dissertation Director: Karen Miller
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish, Gettysburg College
Dissertation: The Performance of History and Memory in 17th-century Spanish Theater, Then and Now
Dissertation Director: Bob Blue
Position: Assistant Professor, Bucknell University
Dissertation: Patterns of variable tense-aspect marking in Palenquero creole
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Position: Associate Professor of Spanish , University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Dissertation: The Artist, Myth, and Society in the Contemporary Spanish Novel, 1945-2010
Dissertation Director: Matthew J. Marr
Position: Natural Language Processing Engineer at Amazon
Dissertation: The role of L2 immersion in the processing of Spanish sentence complement/relative clause ambiguities
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
2013
José Álvarez:
Position: Associate Professor, School of American and Global Studies, South Dakota State University
Dissertation Director: Sophia McLellen & John Ochoa
Joseph Bauman
Position: Associate Teaching Professor, Penn State
Dissertation: From possession to obligation: modal grammaticalization and variation
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Position: High school teacher, Colegio Nueva Granada CNG (Bogotá)
Dissertation: Saintly Lives: (anti)imperial and Transatlantic Discourses in Colonial Hispanic American Poetry and Painting (16th-to-18th-century New Kingdom of Granada and New Spain
Dissertation Director: Julia Cuervo-Hewitt
Position: Assistant Professor of Latin American Cultures, Arizona State University
Dissertation: Reading A Migrant Nation: the Aesthetics Of Internal Migration In 20th And 21st-century Peruvian Narratives
Dissertation Director: Julia Cuervo-Hewitt
Position: Associate Professor of English, Baylor University
Dissertation: The effects of form-focused training and working memory on the L2 processing and learning of morphological cues
Dissertation Director: Karen Miller
Position: Assistant Principal (H-N), Centennial High School
Dissertation: Very frequency effects and mood preference: Implications for the L2 teaching and learning of negated matrix verbs of belief
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
2012
Rebecca Bender
Position: Assistant Professor, Kansas State University
Dissertation: Negotiating the Changing Faces of Motherhood and Maternity through Narrative
Dissertation Director: Nicolás Fernandéz-Medina
Delfina Evelyn Durán Urrea
Position: Assistant Professor, Languages and Literatures, Lehman College CUNY
Dissertation: A community-based study of social, prosodic, and syntactic factors in code-switching
Dissertation Director: Rena Torres Cacoullos
Dissertation: After the Storm did not Come, the Calm: Love, Memory, and Identity in the Modern Mexican Novel, 1947-1963
Dissertation Director: John Ochoa
Position: Professor, University of Puerto Rico – Rio Piedras
Dissertation: Linking comprehension costs to production patterns during the processing of mixed language
Dissertation Directors: Giuli Dussias & Chip Gerfen
Position: Instructor, Municipalidad de General Pueyrredon – Argentina
Dissertation: Una retórica del disimulo: Discurso periodístico y memoria de los 70 en la narrativa de Tomás Eloy Martínez / A Rhetoric of (Dis)Simulation: Journalistic Discourse and Memory of the 70s in Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Narrative
Dissertation Director: Laurence Prescott
Position: Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Cultures, Arcadia University
Dissertation: How Second Language Learners Process Argument Structure: The Effects of First Language and Individual Differences
Dissertation Director: Chip Gerfen
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish and Linguistics, University of Florida
Dissertation: Using eye-tracking to study auditory comprehension in codeswitching: Evidence for the link between comprehension and production
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias & Chip Gerfen
2011
Christopher Botero
Position: Associate Professor, Department of English and Foreign Languages, Augusta University
Dissertation: Factors underlying the improvement of L2 phonological production using technology outside the classroom
Dissertation Director: Chip Gerfen
Kristopher Allen Davis
Dissertation: Second Language Phonological Acquisition: The Role of Musical Aptitude
Dissertation Director: Chip Gerfen
Position: Associate Professor of Spanish, University of Mary Washington
Dissertation: Literary Feminism in Spain: The Splintering of Female Identity in the Contemporary Peninsular Novel
Dissertation Director: Matthew J. Marr
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish, Oklahoma State University
Dissertation: Unaccusativity and word order in Mexican Spanish: an examination of syntactic interfaces and the split intransitivity hierarchy
Dissertation Directors: Jacqueline Toribio & John Lipski
Position: Assistant Professor, Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro
Dissertation: De-Witching Female America: The Figure of the Sorceress in the Representation of America
Dissertation Director: Julia Cuervo-Hewitt
2010
David Counselman
Position: Associate Professor of Spanish, Ohio Wesleyan University
Dissertation: Improving pronunciation in the second language classroom
Dissertation Director: Giuli Dussias
Arlette DeJesus
Position: Assistant Professor of Spanish, Anderson University
Dissertation: The Teresian Epistolary or the Backstage of Foundings and Reforms: The Construction of Power in the Letters of Saint Therese of Avila
Dissertation Director: Mary Barnard
Position: Assistant Professor, Slippery Rock University
Dissertation: Los discursos de la maternidad, madres e hijas en la narrativa española del nuevo milenio escrita por mujeres
Dissertation Director: Matthew J. Marr
Position: Associate Professor of Spanish Linguistics, Appalachian State University
Dissertation: Hiatus Resolution in Spanish: An Experimental Study
Dissertation Director: Chip Gerfen
Dissertation: Female Agency in “El baúl de Miss Florence: fragmentos para un novelón romántico,” Dreaming in Cuban, and ¡YO!
Dissertation Director: Laurence Prescott