Department News
Congratulations to our 2023 Marsha Gray Ehrlich Scholarship Fund Recipients
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is delighted to announce this year’s Marsha Gray Ehrlich Scholarship Fund recipients. Marsha Gray Ehrlich was a former graduate student in our Department, and an inspirational teacher during her …
Denise Oyuki Castillo Named a College of Letters & Science Teaching Mentor
PhD candidate Denise Oyuki Castillo has been offered a position as a College of Letters & Science Teaching Mentor. Every year, L&S welcomes and trains hundreds of new TAs. Teaching Mentors are the heart of …
Professor Paola Hernández Named Mellon-Morgridge Professor
Professor Paola Hernández has been named a Mellon-Morgridge Professor. This professorship is part of the Constellations humanities program, a collaborative initiative to energize undergraduate interest in the humanities through exceptional humanities classes and co-curricular experiences. …
Felipe Moraga Receives Campus-Wide Innovation in Teaching Award
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is pleased to share that Felipe Moraga is the recipient of one of this year’s campus-wide Innovation in Teaching Awards! This is the second time Felipe has been recognized …
Katherine Ward receives Fulbright Award
Department of Spanish & Portuguese PhD candidate Katherine Ward has received a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship to support her dissertation titled, Intercultural Bilingual Educators’ Perceptions of Non-Standardized Spanish in Ecuador: A Case Study …
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The Department of Spanish & Portuguese Statement on Diversity, Inclusion, and Anti-Racism
The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is invested in being a truly diverse and inclusive community in which individuals of any gender, race, ethnicity, disability status, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, cultural upbringing, language variety, and socioeconomic standing can flourish equally. We believe that diversity and inclusion are fundamental characteristics of a rich academic community. We aim at fostering the exploration and expression of differing ideas, beliefs, and perspectives, especially those of the most vulnerable members of society. In fulfilling our mission to advance diversity, we seek to recruit, hire, retain, reward, and promote people from different backgrounds to increase the number, visibility, and well-being of underrepresented people.
As modern notions of race have their roots in Iberian history and processes of colonization, the Department of Spanish & Portuguese is particularly committed to studying and confronting all forms of racism and its attendant ideologies, such as ableism, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, and anti-Semitism. We learn from and celebrate the political struggles of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and other racialized peoples across Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries, including the United States. Through the study of languages and literatures, we find inspiration in diverse ways of imagining and creating a better world, while remaining vigilant to the aestheticization of violence and the many forms of duplicity with which inequity has been reproduced to this day. Racism and other forms of bigotry are still part of our institutions, methods, and ways of thinking. Our department is committed to continue the process of bringing our research and teaching in more just and enriching directions. As educators working on Ho-Chunk lands and experiencing the effects of imperial expansion, we strive to dismantle the legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, to revise our curriculum, and to incorporate new pedagogies, epistemologies, and languages.