Faculty

Gwendolyn Barnes-Karol (Ph.D., Minnesota) is a specialist in Spanish Literature and has special interest in the interaction between oral and written/print culture, the reception of literature, and the development of the Spanish literary canon. She is one of the general editors of the Hispanic issues monograph series published by the University of Minnesota Press. As an undergraduate, she studied at the University of Santiago de Compostela, the University of Granada, and the Complutense in Madrid, Spain. As a graduate student, she completed studies at the Instituto Internacional of Madrid. Her work in the use of authentic cultural materials and the development of foreign-languages-across-the-curriculum programs is nationally recognized. Because of her widely recognized work in the use of authentic cultural materials, she was selected to teach graduate courses for American high school Spanish teachers in Madrid. This graduate program was sponsored by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and the Fundacion Ortega y Gasset. She has taught St. Olaf groups of students in Costa Rica, Ecuador, and Mexico.

Maggie Broner (Ph.D, Minnesota) is a specialist in Hispanic sociolinguistics. A native of Argentina who grew up in Venezuela and Canada, she was exposed at an early age to dialectal variation and cross-linguistic communication (and miscommunication). Her personal family history had a profound impact on her developing a personal interest in Latin America, which she has been able to share with students through teaching the Spanish FLAC course, Latin American Politics, with Kris Thalhammer (Department of Political Science). Broner’s linguistic courses have a strong emphasis on how social variables intersect with issues of language rights, language policy, and language use in Latin America and the U.S.

Sylvia G. Carullo (Ph.D., New York)

At St. Olaf since 1990, Sylvia Graciela Carullo is a native of Argentina, who received her Ph.D. from State University of New York at Buffalo. Her area of specialization is Colonial Spanish-American literature. Her research focuses mainly on the literary representation of the female figure in Spanish- American literature. Her book on the literary portraiture in some poems by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, El retrato literario en Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was published by Peter Lang in 1991. She has presented and published scholarly articles on Spanish-American 20th century writers on literary iconography of the female model, love, honor, marriage, among other topics. She also conducts research in Florence, Italy, on Renaissance art and literature. Her scholarly interests also embrace Hispanic American literature, Latinas/os writers. She teaches Spanish Low, Intermediate and Upper Level courses, on campus as well as abroad. She also has taught in the Great Conversation Program.

Chris Chiappari (Ph.D., Minnesota) became interested in Latin America in college, as he began to learn more about international development. This interest led him to the master’s program in International Agricultural Development at the University of California at Davis, and from there to the Ph.D. program in anthropology at the University of Minnesota. His primary research interest is religion and social change, with a focus on Protestantism and Maya spirituality in highland Guatemala. His other research and teaching interests include social movements, identity, immigration and popular culture.

 

Jeane DeLaney (Ph.D., Stanford) became interested in Latin America as an undergraduate majoring in International Development at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. After her junior year, she left the university to travel to Medellin, Colombia, where she taught English and studied Spanish and economics at the University of Medellin. She later returned to the U.S. to finish her degree, and was awarded the Fulbright for graduating seniors. This grant allowed her to return to Colombia to conduct research on rural cooperatives in a small village near Bogota. She later entered graduate school at Stanford University, earning an M.A. in Latin American Studies and a Ph.D. in history. Her dissertation research focused on the intellectual and cultural history of Argentina. Since completing her degree, she has published articles on national identity an nationalist sentiment in early twentieth-century Argentina. In recent years she has developed a strong secondary interest in Cuba and has taken a January class to that country.

 

León Narváez (Ph.D., Minnesota)

A recipient of Phi Beta Kappa, Professor Narváez was awarded the Ph. D. degree at the University of Minnesota in Hispanic literature and linguistics. He finished his secondary training at Colegio Nueva Granada (Bogota, Colombia), completed part of his college work at the Universidad de Navarra (Pamplona, Spain) and has lived in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and Costa Rica. His research interests include cultural and migration studies as well as literary and linguistic analysis. Narváez is the former president of the state association for teachers of Spanish and Portuguese and former coordinator of the Minnesota State Spanish Contest, and he has worked as an administrator, editor, interpreter, recording artist, consultant and translator. In addition to numerous articles, language games, and reviews, his published work includes nine books and two workbooks edited or written by him or in collaboration with others. Of over fifty awards/honors, three examples are: in 1987 he received the Ricardo A. Narváez Award for excellence in the teaching of Spanish from the Minnesota chapter of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) and in 1988 he was recognized by the AATSP through a national teaching award as the outstanding college/university teacher of Spanish in the United States. In 2001 Narváez was given the Award of Merit by the North Central Council of Latin Americanists for promoting understanding and cooperation between the U.S. and Latin America.

 

Bruce Nordstrom (Ph.D., California-Berkeley) has academic interests which include Native Americans in North and South American Peasant Communities and gender issues in Latin America. Most recently he has done research in Hispanic communities of northern New Mexico. As a teacher in the foreign-languages-across-the-curriculum program, he and Leon Narvaez developed a Spanish-language component for a sociology course on marriage and the family.

 

Jonathan O’Conner received his Ph.D. in Spanish Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2011. He specializes in the literature and culture of sixteenth-century Spain. Through the assistance of two research grants, he has conducted archival research in Madrid and Toledo, Spain, at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Archivo Histórico Provincial de Toledo and the Archivo Capitular de la Catedral de Toledo. His dissertation examines the vibrant intellectual and cultural life of sixteenth-century Toledo and its connection to the culture of Renaissance Italy. His research and teaching interests include Spanish Golden Age Literature, cultural histories and the history of the Spanish language.

Nancy Paddleford (D.M.A., Minnesota) has had a long-term interest in Hispanic music. Her doctoral thesis treats the folk elements in the piano music of Enrique Granados. She has traveled in Puerto Rico and Mexico, and lived in Costa Rica and Spain. In 1988 Professor Paddleford was a Visiting Artist at the University of Costa Rica in the area of piano performance. In the summer of 1991 she took part in the National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Latin American music at the University of Texas-Austin and since then has written several articles about Costa Rican composers. For two years she served as Associate Director of the ACM Latin American Programs in Costa Rica. In both 1993 and 1994 she was an invited performer at the International Festival of Music of Costa Rica held in the historic Teatro Nacional in San Jose.

 

David Schodt (Ph.D., Wisconsin) was introduced to Latin America when he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador from 1969-1972. He has returned on numerous occasions, among those as a Fulbright Research Fellow in 1984, and more recently, as a consultant for projects funded by the World Bank and for the U.S. Agency for International Development. From 1991-1992, he was a Pew Faculty Fellow in International Affairs at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he worked with using cases to teach international affairs. He has served as President of the North Central Council of Latin Americanists, a midwestern organization for those interested in Latin America, and is currently president of the ALIAS section of the International Studies Association. He has published two books and numerous articles on the Ecuadorian economy. He edits the “Ecuador economy” section for the Handbook of Latin American Studies, published by the Library of Congress. His current research involves structural adjustment and poverty.

Ariel Strichartz (Ph.D., Kansas) first became fascinated by the Spanish-speaking world in her native state of New Mexico. As an undergraduate at Rice University, she majored in Spanish and studied Spanish language and art history in Madrid, Spain. She later earned an M.A. in Latin American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Her master’s thesis, inspired after a summer of graduate study in Mexico City, focused on the mythical treatment of revolutionary figures in Mexican history and their subsequent demythification in contemporary Mexican theatre. She later earned a doctorate in Spanish at the University of Kansas, where she continued to pursue her interest in Latin American literature, and in theatre in particular. Her research focuses on theatre of the Southern Cone, particularly that of Argentina and Chile, theatre under dictatorship, and literary treatment of the culinary. She teaches a variety of courses in the Spanish program, including interim abroad courses in Ecuador, and has taught the Hispanic Studies seminar with a Spanish language component through the Foreign Languages Across the Curriculum program at St. Olaf.

Kristina Thalhammer (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) specializes in comparative politics, Latin American politics, and individual political behavior. Her work focuses on human rights issues and citizen resistance to government repression. She has lived in Argentina and done research on why citizens were able to form a human rights movement there during the last military regime.

Alberto Villate-Isaza (Ph.D., Boston College) received his B.A. in literary studies at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2008 in Hispanic Studies at Boston College. Besides teaching a variety of courses in Spanish language, culture and literature, through different fellowships he has had the opportunity to conduct research in the Biblioteca Nacional in Bogotá and in the Archivo de Indias in Seville. His dissertation deals with the topic of Hispanic-American baroque historiography in Nueva Granada (modern-day Colombia) and its influence on discourses of national identity during the nineteenth century. His research and teaching interests include Peninsular and Hispanic-American Baroque Literature, Political and Social Theory of the Baroque, Discourses of Latin-American Identity and early Twentieth-Century Hispanic-American literature, especially modernismo and the essay.