Spanish and Portuguese Faculty
Frances Alpren (email)
Senior Lecturer; Coordinator of Elementary Spanish II 102 (M.A., Louisiana State University). Spanish language. Her areas of interest are second language acquisition, Sephardic literature of the Golden Age period, and Ladino literature.
Jose Aznar (email)
Senior Lecturer (M.A., Arkansas Tech University). Spanish language. Aznar ‘s current interests have been geared towards the social impact of illegal immigration in Spain as well as in the U.S.
Marcio Bahia (email)
Assistant Professor of Portuguese (Ph.D., University of Ottawa). Portuguese language. Bahia’s interests include film; memory and notions of Americanidad, and Inter-American studies.
Susan Berk-Seligson (email)
Professor of Spanish Linguistics (Ph.D., University of Arizona). Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language in institutional settings (particularly language and the law), language and gender.
José Cárdenas Bunsen (email)
Assistant Professor of Spanish (Ph.D., Yale University). 16th- through 19th-century colonial Latin American literature and culture, with a particular focus on Bartolomé de las Casas.
Earl E. Fitz (email)
Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature (Ph.D., City University of New York). Luso-Brazilian literature, Spanish American literature, Inter-American literature, comparative literature.
Edward H. Friedman (email)
Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature; Faculty Director of the Robert Penn Warren Center (Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University). Golden Age literature, comparative literature.
Chalene Helmuth (email)
Senior Lecturer; Coordinator of Spanish for True Beginners (Ph.D., University of Kentucky). Contemporary Latin American literature, identity and narrative, U.S. Latina cultural production, incarceration and U.S. immigrant communities; teaches VISAGE Costa Rica.
Clint Hendrix (email)
Senior Lecturer; Coordinator of Intermediate Spanish 104 (Ph.D., University of Kansas). His interests include Spanish American vanguardism, literary theory, travel literature, and hybridity as related to genre and gender.
Ruth Hill (email)
Professor of Spanish; Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities (Ph.D., University of Michigan-Ann Arbor). Professor Hill researches and teaches the critical histories of science, race, and class from the early modern period to the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the transamerican and transatlantic engagements of the social and life sciences.
Cathy L. Jrade (email)
Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish; Chair, Department of Spanish and Portuguese (Ph.D., Brown). Latin American poetry, modernism. Awarded NEH Faculty Fellowship for Delmira Agustini: A Modernista on her Own Terms.
Christina Karageorgou-Bastea (email)
Associate Professor of Spanish (Ph.D., El Colegio de Mexico). Spanish avant-garde, Federico García Lorca, twentieth century Mexican and Latin American poetry and visual arts.
William Luis (email)
Chancellor’s Professor of Spanish; Director of Latino and Latina Studies; Editor Afro-Hispanic Review; (Ph.D., Cornell). Latin American literature and Caribbean studies. The Afro-Hispanic Review is the leading interdisciplinary journal featuring issues of race in Spanish America, Prof. Luis brought it to Vanderbilt University where it will be edited and published.
Patrick Murphy (email)
Senior Lecturer; Coordinator of Spanish 103 (M.A., University of Tennessee). Spanish language, major and minor advising. Murphy participates as a faculty VUceptor in the Vanderbilt Visions program, which is a university organization designed to assist first-year students in their orientation to the campus community. Murphy also leads student groups to Cuba.
Elena Olazagasti-Segovia (email)
Senior Lecturer (Ph.D., University of Río Piedras, Puerto Rico). Contemporary Latin American literature and film, twentieth century peninsular women novelists, Caribbean and Puerto Rican literature and culture. Service-learning.
Carolina Palacios (email)
Senior Lecturer; Coordinator of Spanish for True Beginners 100 and Elementary Spanish I 101 (Ph.D., University of Tennessee). Her area of interest is twentieth century Latin American theater.
Michelle Sheperd (email)
Assistant Professor of Spanish (Ph.D., Stony Brook University). Michelle Shepherd’s research interests are rooted in contemporary Spanish literature and film and informed by intersectional fields of literary theory, gender studies, and cultural studies.
Cynthia Wasick (email)
Senior Lecturer; Director of Undergraduate Studies (M.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison). Lexicographer, Spanish Language for Professions, Spanish Linguistics, Spanish Civilization and Cultural Studies.
Andrés Zamora (email)
Associate Professor of Spanish (Ph.D., University of Southern California). Eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century Spanish literature and Cervantes. Director of Vanderbilt-in-Spain 2009-2010.