Our teaching faculty have won significant awards this year again: Teaching Professor Israel Herrera won the 2024 IU FACET P.A. Mack Award for Excellence and Distinguished Service to Teaching and a national award, the Indiana Latino Educator of the Year Award by the Klett World Languages Organization and AATSP. Teaching Professor Virginia Hojas-Carbonell won the inaugural FACET Brancato-Orr Award. This year’s Trustees Teaching Awards went to Senior Lecturer Robin Reeves and Linguistics Professor Manuel Díaz-Campos.

Among the research faculty, we have been busy organizing two conferences, the Big Ten Academic Alliance Conference in Romance Languages, co-organized between the Chairs of Spanish and Portuguese and French and Italian at IU, and the Pragmatics and Language Learning Conference, co-organized by Linguistics Professor César Félix-Brasdefer together with Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig. Several books were published and celebrated at this year’s College Book Party, and an exhibition on "Lorca and the Archive: Memory in Motion", co-curated by Melissa Dinverno, opened in Granada, Spain on December 12, 2024, and received a lot of press attention.

Our Department also underwent an external review in spring of this year, which is something mandated every seven years for accreditation purposes. It was a lot of work but also made us more aware of each other and proud of how dynamic and outstanding our research profiles are in all three programs of the Department. I’m glad to say that the review went as well as it possibly could have gone.

On to the more difficult news: this spring, we had to close our Portuguese BA because of low enrollment. The good news is that students can continue to specialize in Portuguese with us, since we have created a new track within the Spanish BA, called the “Spanish-Portuguese Studies-track,” which will be offered starting this fall next to our Hispanic Linguistics and Hispanic Studies (culture/literature) tracks. We will continue to do outreach and promote the study of Portuguese at the undergraduate level, and we are grateful that we received a timely donation to the Department in support of Portuguese studies, the annual Darlene J. Sadlier Scholarship in Portuguese for the best student specializing in Portuguese.

More mandated changes are afoot, due to new Indiana State legislation: the Portuguese PhD will have to be moved under the umbrella of the Spanish PhD, our Spanish MA will have to be folded into our Spanish PhD, and 5-year post tenure reviews will need to be added to our annual review procedures. We will continue to advocate for strong self-governance and make the best out of this new framework.

We continue to enjoy engaging with each other on multiple fronts as a community: this year we held on May 4^th the second Kim Geeslin 5K race, with over 120 participants and all proceeds going to the Kim Geeslin Graduate student fellowship. Associate Chair Estela Vieira spearheaded our first, successful IU-Day crowdfunding campaign, themed Comunidad(e). The graduate students organized another successful graduate conference Diálogos and several other social events, and multiple lectures and brown bag workshops took place in all three programs. Finally, Teatro VIDA celebrated its 20^th anniversary, with graduate student founder Marda Rose returning to campus after many years for a special performance.

We also received a generous single donation this year by our alumn Andy Thieneman, allowing us to create a new Thieneman Faculty Fellowship Account, supporting faculty research and professional development. We are so grateful for this new initiative, as we are for all our alumni’s’ and friends’ continued giving!

Departures and Hires: three teaching faculty colleagues have left us at the end of the spring semester: Maria Montenegro, Hernán Matzkevich, and Virginia Hojas Carbonell. While Maria and Hernán accepted positions at other universities, Virginia, who has been with us for 18 years as Assistant Director of the Basic Language Program, will move into a higher position at IU and become the new director of the Bloomington Faculty Council. Many congratulations, Virginia!!! We will miss Virginia, as well as Maria and Hernán, and we wish them well in their new, exciting positions. I’m glad to report that we were able to hire Noraedén Mora Méndez as incoming lecturer this year, who comes to Bloomington with a PhD in Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture from University of Southern California.

For this coming year, we look forward to the next Merle E. Simmons Distinguished Alumni lecture, to take place on Friday, September 19, 2025, at 5pm in the IMU Oak Room. Let us know if you’re in the area, as alumni and friends of the department, we’d love to see you there! Please also follow us on Facebook or Instagram, and on our website, to stay up to date with events and activities.

Warm wishes for 2025-26,

Anke Birkenmaier