About Us

INSTITUTE COORDINATORS

Kristin Janka Millar is Coordinator for the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies' (CLACS) undergraduate program. She is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Teacher Education, and before coming to MSU, she was a fourth grade teacher in Bath, Michigan. Her research interests include: teacher learning, professional development, social studies education, global and international education and Latin American studies. Much of her research and work have focused on teacher professional development for internationalizing K-16 education, and teaching about Latin America in K-12 schools. In particular, she is interested in how social studies curriculum and professional development programs address/teach about others.

Rocio Quispe-Agnoli (Ph.D. 2000, Brown University). Associate professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Latin American Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She specializes in the Andean region and has published   La fe andina en la escritura: identidad y resistencia en la obra de Guaman Poma de Ayala (Lima: Fondo Editorial de la UNMSM, 2006) and edited a special issue of Cuaderno Internacional de Estudios Hispánicos y Lingüística entitled "Beyond the Convent: Colonial Women's Voices and Daily Challenges in Spanish America" (2006).. Professor Quispe-Agnoli's current research explores   the indigenous Latin American visual literacies, and   approaches to teaching Latin American indigenous cultures in the US College and K-12 classroom.   For more information visit www.msu.edu/~quispeag



INSTITUTE FACULTY

Gabriela Alfaraz (Ph.D. 2000, Michigan State University). Assistant professor of Spanish Applied Linguistics in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Her research interests include Bilingualism and Spanish in the US.

Eduardo Guizar-Alvarez (Ph.D. 2002, University of Iowa) Assistant Professor of Mexican and Latin American literary and cultural studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Michigan State University. He holds a B.A. in English from the Universidad Autónoma de México, an M.A. in Education from the University of London, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Spanish from The University of Iowa.   He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University from 2002 to 2004. His present research focuses on literary and cultural texts produced in marginal sites in Mexico. His scholarly articles have been published in Revista Iberoamericana, Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana , and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture , among others.

María E. Mudrovcic   (Ph.D. 1994, University of Southern California). Associate professor of 20 th -century Latin-American Literary and Cultural studies. Her research and teaching interests include literary theory and popular cultural studies. She has published   Mundo Nuevo: Cultura Y Guerra Fria En La Decada Del 60 (Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo, 1997) and a new edition of   Eugenio Cambaceres' En la sangre (Stockcero, 2006)

Eve Zyzik , (Ph.D. 2004, University of California, Davis). Assistant professor of Applied Spanish Linguistics and core faculty member in the Second Language Studies program. She specializes in Spanish Linguistics and conducts research on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language. Her additional research interests include content-based language teaching, Spanish in the U.S., and heritage languages. She teaches undergraduate courses in Spanish linguistics and graduate courses in the areas of second language acquisition and teaching methods.