Whitney Chappell (Hispanic Linguistics - zoom):

Whitney Chappell (PhD, Ohio State University, 2013) is an Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), and she has been named the UTSA College of Liberal and Fine Arts’ 2021 Researcher of the Year, 2020-2021 Lutcher Brown Distinguished Professor, and 2019 Fulbright Scholar. Specializing in variationist sociolinguistics, her research sheds light on how phonetic features and social meanings interface across diverse speech communities in the Spanish-speaking world. She explores sociophonetic production and perception in monolingual, bilingual, and L2 contexts, which centers different types of linguistic knowledge and leads to a more nuanced understanding of Spanish variation. Additionally, her research fosters a deeper understanding of the social mechanisms that privilege certain linguistic practices over others and prompts a dismantling of the ideologies that uphold racist and classist linguistic hierarchies. Her work has appeared in prestigious venues like the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language Variation and Change, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and the Journal of Linguistic Geography, among many others, and her invited presentations span six countries. Her edited volumes include Recent Advances in the Study of Spanish Sociophonetic Perception, Spanish Socio-Historical Linguistics: Isolation and Contact, and Social meanings of language variation in Spanish. The interdisciplinarity of her work reaches into education; social psychology; anthropology; music; and history, which allows us to delve into linguistic questions with broad implications while also helping to determine how and why language variation and change occurs. 

Bob Davidson (Hispanic Literatures - in person):

Bob Davidson, Mary Rowell Jackman Professor of Humanities at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College and faculty in the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese, specializes in the study of food, drink, and hospitality. Author of Jazz Age Barcelona (shortlisted for the Canada Prize) and The Hotel: Occupied Space, his latest project, The Scent of Spain: Fragrance, Odour and Culture, looks at key fragrances and smells that were part of Spain’s modern experience. Prof. Davidson currently serves as Director of the Northrop Frye Centre and, in addition to chairing the Manuscript Review Committee at University of Toronto Press, is founder and co-editor of the Toronto Iberic book series. He takes his martini with a little extra vermouth and an olive.

Paulo Dutra (Portuguese - in person):

Paulo Dutra holds a PhD from Purdue University and he is currently assistant professor of Portuguese and Spanish at the University of New Mexico. A Don Quijote aficionado, he is a side effect of a self-legitimated system of privileged cultural representation that drove him into becoming a non-traditional college student, an addict to short story writing and reading, a poet, and a teacher/scholar in order to escape performing activities, for a living, that some machine could easily accomplish. He is the author of Aversão oficial: resumida (Malê, 2018) and of the semifinalist of 2020 Oceanos Prize book of poetry abliterações (Malê, 2019). He specializes in the intersections of race and artistic and cultural production in Luso-Brazilian/Latin-American context with an emphasis on conducting independent approaches to literary and cultural production that present alternatives to mainstream practices. His scholarly work on Don Quijote, race in Machado de Assis’s works, and Racionais MC’s’s rap music has appeared in journals and book chapters in Brazil, Argentina and The United States.