Three faculty members in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese have been promoted, demonstrating excellent performance in teaching, service and research.
Dr. Kristin Doran is promoted from Assistant Professor of Practice to Associate Professor of Practice.
Dr. Julieta Fernández is promoted from Assistant Professor to tenured Associate Professor.
Dr. Miriam Rocío Urzúa-Montoya is promoted from Lecturer to Senior Lecturer.
Doran is the Director of the Basic Language Program and faculty sponsor to the Spanish Club in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a Faculty Affiliate of Latin American Studie. She received her Ph.D. in Spanish and Luso-Brazilian Literature from the University of Arizona. Her areas of interest are Contemporary Peninsular and Luso-Brazilian Literature and Teaching Spanish as a Second Language. In Spring 2021, Dr. Doran was the recipient of the College of Humanities Distinguished Undergraduate Advising/Mentoring Award.
Fernández earned a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from Penn State University. She is also a faculty member in the interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT), and a member of the Technology Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) cluster at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on L2 pragmatics; language learning in study abroad; corpus-based discourse analysis; qualitative interviews; and second language learning and pedagogy.
Originally from Guadalajara, Mexico, Urzúa-Montoya moved to the United States in 1993 to pursue her undergraduate and graduate studies. She holds a B.A. in Broadcasting and Spanish from Arizona State University, and a M.A. and Ph. D. in Hispanic Literature from The University of Arizona. Her areas of specialization include 19th to 21st -Century Spanish American and Peninsular literature and culture, and Medieval and Golden Age Spanish literature. Besides teaching, she enjoys books, dancing, movies, hiking, cooking, and travelling, especially to Guadalajara, where all her immediate family still resides.