It has been a very exciting school year and there are lots of new developments to tell you about.
This past summer, local public artist Adam Hernández created a mural on the wall of the main office. The image depicts a fantastical version of the Puerto Rican folk religious object, known as a vejigante. The mural has two “sibling” murals on walls at 8th and High Street and near Hudson and High Street. A time-lapse video of Adam and his brother creating the mural is on our website and also on Adam’s Instagram page (ahernandezart).
Professor Paloma Martínez-Cruz published her long-awaited critical biography of local queer, Latinx activist Rubén Castilla Herrera Trust the Circle: The Resistance and Resilience of Rubén Castilla Herrera (Belt Publishing). Rubén was the child of farmworkers in Texas, who adopted Ohio as his home in 1987, and from then on was a central figure in a wide array of local social justice-related causes. The Wexner Center for the Arts bookstore held a book signing event for Trust the Circle on November 2nd, in conjunction for the annual Día de los Muertos activities that Paloma organizes.
This year we also began to benefit from the many and diverse talens of our newly arrived junior faculty, Dr. Fernanda Díaz-Basteris, a scholar of Latinx comics, Dr. Javier Jasso a bilingual language development and disorders specialist and Dr. Laura Stigliano, a Spanish syntactician and semanticist. All three of these young scholars have brought energy, enthusiasm and welcome new perspectives to our work here. We are delighted to have them! At the same time, we congratulated Dr. Fernando Martínez-Gil on his retirement from his more than 30 years of scholarship, mentorship and friendship. The department will not be the same without him, but we are happy that he gets to spend more time with his family here and in Galicia.
With support from the College of Arts and Sciences, we are partnering this year with local non-profit I Know I Can, in an effort to help promote college access for low-income high school students. I Know I Can has a 30-year history of effective work in this domain, and our PhD student, Victoria Cataloni, is spending the year collaborating with one of their College Advising Managers (CAMs) in Columbus City Schools, to help bridge linguistic and cultural divides that might be obstacles to college for newly-arrived students. Victoria’s plan was to work with De’Chelle Burkhalter, who is one of I Know I Can’s CAMs, and a graduate of our department, to use her fluent Spanish to help families fill out the FAFSA and to help students write the Common Application essay for College. However, she quickly discovered that an entire community of families from Brazil had immigrated to the high school where De’Chelle works. Because Victoria is also fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, she organized a visit of the 15 Brazilian students to OSU, where they sat in on one of Prof. Barra-Costa’s Portuguese classes, visited the library, and heard a presentation from OSU admissions officer Bernardo Ribeiro De Miranda, also in Portuguese. We continue to engage with the Spanish-speaking community in Central Ohio and beyond to make our programming relevant and effective, but it was also very rewarding to see how impressively one of our PhD students organized a potentially life-changing campus visit for Portuguese-speaking students.
In another example of our PhD students diversifying their training, Assistant Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Studies, Rachel Sanabria – winner of the Presidential Distinguished Staff Award for 2024, continued to develop our graduate students’ abilities to advise OSU undergraduates, through our Graduate Advising Assistant (GAA) program. Through this program, graduate students, who are future professors, learn about advising undergraduate students and orienting them to our majors/minors, relevant education-abroad opportunities and to careers using Spanish and Portuguese. Our 5 GAAs visited each of our roughly 100 Spanish and Portuguese language classes and made brief presentations to students on these topics. Rachel’s important work on cultivating professionalism among our PhD students, as well as presenting alternative career paths to them, was supported by a College of Arts and Sciences grant that she and the GAAs used to organize a series of presentations for grad students across the College on alternative career paths. We are lucky to be able to continue to benefit from Rachel’s experience and talent in this, and other, domains.
En fin, I could go on with a long list of accomplishments of our very talented faculty, staff and students, but you get the idea. If you’re in the neighborhood, please come by Hagerty and see the beautiful new mural and tell us what you’re up to these days. Hope to see you soon!
