FACULTY PROFILES

Prof. Marisa Bortolussi

Marisa Bortolussi obtained her PhD in Spanish from Laval University, and her MA in Comparative Literature from Carleton University. In 1986 she accepted a joint appointment between Comparative Literature and Spanish at the U of A, and in joined MLCS full time. Before joining the U of A, she taught Spanish, and French Canadian literature and civilization at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Professor Bortolussi’s specializes in contemporary narrative and literary theory. Her collaborative, interdisciplinary, SSHRC funded research is in the area of literary theory and methodology, in particular, empirical approaches to the study of literary reception and response. Her most recent book, Psychonarratology, co-authored with Peter Dixon, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2003. Her earlier work was in the area of children’s literature.
This research has earned her invitation to present keynote speeches in Cuenca, Santiago de Compostela, Madrid, Granada, Leuven, Belgium, and Brazil. She is currently serving as the President of IGEL (The International Society for the Empirical Study of Literature): http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/IGEL.
Dr. Bortolussi is also the coordinator for the Granada Semester Abroad program.

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Prof. Catherine Caufield

Catherine Caufield is an Assistant Professor in the Religious Studies Program and the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Alberta. She holds a doctorate from the University of Toronto. Dr. Caufield has received a number of awards, including a post-doctoral fellowship in Religion and Latin American literature at the University of Toronto, a Foreign Government Award with the Government of Mexico, and a Killam Award at the University of Alberta. Her research areas of interest are Jewish Latin American fictional literature and hermeneutic literary theory. She has published numerous articles in referred journals, as well as the book Hermeneutical Approaches to Religious Discourse in Mexican Narrative with Peter Lang.

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Prof. Odile Cisneros

Odile Cisneros received a BA magna cum laude in philosophy and math from Wellesley College in 1991 and a PhD in Hispanic languages and literatures from New York University in 2003. She has taught at the University of Alberta since 2003. Prof. Cisneros's book project Nationalizing the Modern: Tensions in the Mexican and Brazilian Avant-Gardes, 1921-1934, examines the tensions and contradictions inherent in the double dynamic of creating modern models for national art and literature, while "nationalizing" the vocabularies of the European avant-gardes. Prof. Cisneros's specializations and interests include the Latin American historical avant-gardes & avant-garde/modernism in comparative perspective; modern and contemporary Brazilian poetry;Mexican literature; and literary translation (theory and practice). Her book-length translations of poetry include:

Novas: Selected Writings of Haroldo de Campos . Selected, edited, translated, and with an Introduction, co-authored with A.S. Bessa Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007 (forthcoming)
Poemas (1990-2004) by Régis Bonvicino. Selected, edited and part translated with Rodolfo Mata et al. Mexico City: Alforja/CONACULTA/FONCA, 2006.
En las ondas de la TSF by Jaroslav Seifert, Spanish translation from the Czech with an introduction. Mexico City: Conaculta/El Tucán de Virginia, 2000
L'Ours Blessé by Rodrigo Rey Rosa with art by Miquel Barceló, English translation from the Spanish. Cologne: Jablonka Galerie, 2000.

She is also associate editor of the São Paulo-based poetry and culture journal Sibila along with Régis Bonvicino, Alcir Pécora, and Charles Bernstein. She has published poetry translations, criticism, and reviews in the following journals: Harvard Review, Mandorla, Torre de Papel, Literatura mexicana, Aufgabe, Sebastião, Circumference, Mantis, Sibila, Translation, Canecalón, La Jornada, Tsé-tsé, Et Cetera, Chicago Postmodern Poetry, Review: Literature & Arts of the Americas, Ecopoetics, and Poesía y poética. Thanks to a Banff International Literary Translation Centre award in 2006, she recently completed a full-length English translation of Haroldo de Campos's Galáxias with Suzanne Jill Levine.

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Prof. Russell Cobb

Russell Cobb graduated with a BA in Spanish and English from the University of Iowa. He holds an MA in Spanish and a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught at the University of Alberta since 2008. His previous publications have examined the promotion of the Latin American Boom in the United States and the rivalry between literary magazines Mundo Nuevo and Casa de las Americas. Currently, he is researching the idea of cultural authenticity in Cuban music, Mexican food, and Latin American intellectual history. The project embodies his belief in cross-disciplinary inquiry and innovative scholarship. He has also worked as a journalist and writer of creative non-fiction, writing and editing for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He won the Faculty of Arts Mactaggart Writing Prize in 2010. He serves as books editor for the new journal Imaginations, and will also work as the journal’s resident blogger. He is also an avid basketball player and aficionado of Brazilian music.

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Prof. Ann De León

Ann De León received a BA in Biology from Wellesley College in 1999 and a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures at The Johns Hopkins University in 2007 under the guidance of Dr. Sara Castro-Klarén. In 2007 she joined the Spanish/LAST section of MLCS as an Assistant Professor of Colonial Latin American Literatures and Cultural Studies. Currently, Ann is working on a book-length manuscript expanding upon her doctoral dissertation “The Production and Reproduction of “Aztec” Bodies: Translating Pictorial and Textual Discourses on the Human Body from Sahagún’s Florentine Codex (1579)” where she investigates the problem of multi-level translation of the Aztec body and the role of the translator in Sahagún’s (and over 400 post-Conquest indigenous collaborators) heterogeneous 16th century compendium on Aztec culture and religion and other colonial ethnographic texts. As part of her research she has studied Nahuatl with Dr. Jonathan Amith at Yale University, and Dr. John Sullivan at IDIEZ (Zacatecas, Mexico) and carried out original fieldwork on Nahua body terminology in Tepecxitla, Veracruz. Her research interests focus on an interdisciplinary approach to Latin American Literatures and Cultural Productions, transatlantic studies and post-colonial theory with emphasis on Mexico. She is particularly interested in Latin American Indigenous cultural productions, codices, the Aztec language (Nahuatl), poetry, translation, women’s studies, and theory on the body. Ann has published a book translation: Spanish King of the Incas by Ana-Maria Lorandi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005) and some articles: “Archeology, Monuments, and Writing the Mexican Nation: Antonio Penafiel and the 'Aztec' Palimpsest.” Colorado Review of Hispanic Studies 6 (2009), and “Coatlicue or How to Write the Dismembered Body” MLN Volume 125, No.2, March 2010 (Hispanic Issue). Ann is also writing some articles on how 19th century-scholars on both sides of the Atlantic interpreted, copied, and created their own compendiums on Aztec material culture, codices, and colonial texts.

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Prof. Yvonne Lam

Dr. Lam's general research interests are in the areas of second language acquisition and sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on the integration of sociolinguistic approaches with second language research. Her current research examines the linguistic and sociolinguistic results of contact between Mexican indigenous communities, namely the Totonac, and the larger Spanish-speaking majority. Her recent publications describe the external and internal factors motivating the shift away from the indigenous language in favour of Spanish. Dr. Lam has also studied the application of cognitive linguistics to the teaching and learning of prepositions in Spanish as a foreign language, with the objective of determining whether cognitive linguistics can offer any insights for second language research. She has publications in the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Language Awareness and Canadian Modern Language Review, among others.

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Prof. Victoria Ruétalo

Professor Victoria Ruétalo obtained her PhD in Spanish from Tulane University in 2002 and has taught at the University of Alberta since 2001 where she is Associate Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies. She specializes in the study of Latin American popular culture, cultural studies, and film, in particular the study of cinemas that go beyond the boundaries of the nation to see how these impact both local and global markets. She received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada grant to hold a two-day workshop to bring together scholars from across Canada, the UK, Spain, Latin America and the USA to discuss the emerging field of Latin American exploitation cinemas. This led to the completion of an anthology titled Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America (Routledge, 2009) co-edited with Dr. Dolores Tierney from the University of Sussex. Exploring the much neglected area of Latin American exploitation cinema, this anthology challenges established continental and national histories and canons which often exclude exploitation cinema due to its perceived 'low' cultural status. It argues that Latin American exploitation cinema makes an important aesthetic and social contribution to the larger body of Latin American cinema - often competing with Hollywood and more mainstream national cinemas in terms of popularity. Dr. Ruétalo's essays on Latin American film and culture have been published in various journals (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Cultural Critique, and Studies in Latin American Popular Culture), and anthologies (Violence in Argentine Literature and Film, Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies, Our North America: From Turtle Island to the Security and Prosperity Partnership). She is currently working on a manuscript about the work of Argentine sexploitation duo, director Armando Bó and star Isabel Sarli, that examines the local, regional and global impact of their work during the 1960s and 1970s, a fervent period of exploitation cinemas in Latin America.

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Prof. Gabriela Zapata

Research Interests

L1 Attrition; Bilingualism; Second Language Acquisition (vocabulary and syntax); Language Program Direction and Materials Development; Computer Assisted Language Learning in Second/Foreign Language Classrooms.

Professor Zapata's main research foci are Bilingualism, L1 attrition, and SLA (vocabulary and syntax). Professor Zapata has worked on a series of collaborative projects that have investigated the lexico-semantic and discursive-pragmatic properties that regulate the production and interpretation of preverbal subjects in the Spanish of heritage speakers as compared to that of monolinguals and L2 learners from a generative perspective. At present, she's involved in other collaborative studies within the same theoretical framework that focus on the discursive-pragmatic properties that are implicated in knowledge of the referential pronominal system of Spanish by reference to the three distinct populations mentioned above. She's also working on two other collaborative research projects on vocabulary acquisition and L1 attrition with researchers at the Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics at the University of Alberta. She has published in CALL, International Journal of Bilingualism, and Language Awareness, among others.

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