It has been an exciting year of re-building our department and of big changes in the College of Arts and Sciences, some of which have helped us do our jobs better. To start with, the College decided to improve our standing as an undergraduate institution, we should reduce the maximum class size of our general education courses, which includes the first three semesters of Spanish, Portuguese and Quechua, among others, from 27 to 19 students. To serve the several thousand undergraduates per semester that pass through these courses, this meant we had to hire nine new associated faculty, which is a substantial number. We were fortunate in our hiring process to find exceptionally qualified Spanish and Portuguese instructors, most of whom have PhDs, and several of whom left tenure-track jobs to come be part of our team. Among these is Professor Aracelis Nieves Maysonet, our new Heritage Language specialist which she prefers to call Spanish for Fluent Speakers, who comes to us from Universidad Ana Méndez. Professor Holly Nibert, our Language Program Director, and I are delighted with the new, and the veteran, talent that now makes up our instructional group.
This was to be only the beginning of our hiring, however, the department was allowed to hire three new tenure-track faculty! Fernanda Díaz Basteris joins our Latinx Literatures and Cultures emphasis, with her work on graphic novels, some of which focus on the response of Puerto Rican society to the devastation wrought by Hurricane María. Dr. Díaz Basteris was hired as part of a Latinx cluster hire that resulted in two other Latinx hires, Mintzi Martínez-Rivera in Comparative Studies and Carlos Rivas, in the History of Art Department.
Laura Stigliano joins our Hispanic Linguistics section, with her syntactic research on Spanish verb phrase ellipsis, to help understand how phonetically silent sentence structure comes to have some meanings, but not others. This is a dimension of linguistics at Ohio State, and in our department, which has traditionally been strong and we are delighted to have a young scholar with great potential form part of our faculty. Finally, Javier Jasso also joins our Hispanic Linguistics section, with a specialization in bilingual developmental language disorders, including clinical certification as a Speech-Language Pathologist. Javier’s hire is part of a cross-departmental hire with the Department of Speech and Hearing Science, to create a bilingual Speech-Language Pathology clinic and MA program, which pairs our two units, across Humanities and Social and Behavioral Science. The homologous search in Speech and Hearing Science resulted in the hire of Jissel Anaya and Nahar Albudoor, both of whom are also specialists in bilingual language disorders, making Ohio State’s program one of the strongest and largest in the country. Our department was truly successful this year in making Ohio State a more diverse intellectual environment, with greater representation of people of color and world-class research potential.
Our graduate students have also been busy this year, putting themselves, and us, on the map internationally. This includes Julián Baldemira’s successful Fulbright-Hays grant for his dissertation research in Brazil and Victor Vimos’s book of poetry Acta de Fundación, which won the Jorge Carrera Andrade National Poetry Award in Ecuador. We hooded two of our graduate students at our annual Graduation and Awards Ceremony, in Hagerty Hall 180, on May 6, 2023: Santiago Gualapuro and Angela Acosta. That same day, we congratulated 50 undergraduate majors and minors who showed up with their families, and who heard a keynote presentation by alumnus Jonathan Pearson (Class of ’97), who works in global public health and disaster preparedness around infection diseases. Jonathan will also be one of our speakers in our new fall class, Careers in Spanish, in which students are systematically presented with different career paths corresponding to our majors and double majors.
In summary, it has been an exciting year for the department, as we attempt to return to normality, and rebuild ourselves. We are having lunches with alumni and Program 60 students these days, so if we have not yet contacted you and you would like the chance to check in and tell us what you’re thinking, please contact Juliann Garrett.
Sincerely,
John Grinstead
