Contact Information

About

Natalia Ruiz-Rubio is from Spain. She has a BA in Romances Languages and Certificate in Comparative Literatures from Universidad de Extremadura. She completed a MA in Hispanic Literatures and a PhD in Hispanic Cultural Studies at Michigan State University. She specialized in Latin American and Spanish Film.

Her dissertation focused on fashion and citizenship in Latin American.  Her current research project analyzes the cultural contributions of the post-dictatorship generation aiming to document of the struggles for truth, justice, and intergenerational dialogue in the South Cone and Spain. Her latest publication is entitled: “In Search of the Father: Forgetting and Autofiction in Two Argentine Documentaries: El (im)posible olvido (Impossible to Forget, Habegger, 2016) and El padre (The Father, Arruti, 2016).” in the volume War and Remembrance in World Cinema (forthcoming).

In her free time, she loves hiking, backpacking, cooking, and watching movies.

About

García-Sánchez obtained a Licenciatura in Spanish Philology from the University of Salamanca, Spain (1989), and a Master of Arts (1993) and a PhD from Arizona State University (1996). His research focuses on the 18th and 19th-century Transatlantic travel narrative, with special interest on logs written by Spanish explorers in the Pacific Northwest. His line of research in this corpus of study is founded on Discourse Analysis and Postcolonial Theory.

García Sánchez has taught all levels of Spanish at EWU. He is the director of the Summer Program in Salamanca, Spain.

About

Gina Petrie has an MA TESOL from Indiana University and a PhD in Education from Washington State University. She has worked in a wide variety of environments with English language learners throughout her career. She carries out research exploring the sociocultural contexts that teachers and students work in with her most recent work focusing on teacher education in Nicaragua. She is an English language specialist with the U.S. State Department, supporting teachers globally with teaching English for Specific Purposes.

About

José Rojas is from Mérida, Venezuela. He has a BA from the University of Hotel school of Venezuela and a BA from EWU. Also, he finished his Master in Spanish Language and Culture at the University Of Salamanca, Spain. He is interested in Latin-American cultures. Due to his first career, Jose was able to live in many different countries around the world. Therefore, he promotes incorporating the differences in cultures into his classes.

In his spare time, he likes to play soccer, read about World War II, and cooking and eating out with his wife and kids.

About

Erina Ikuta Romanowich is from Shizuoka-prefecture, Japan. She earned a BS from San Diego State University and a MA in Teaching Foreign Languages from California State University, Chico. Her teaching career started at the University of Texas at San Antonio. There, she was also the program coordinator for the East Asia Institute, which organized Japanese language and cultural events for university students. She enjoys hiking and cooking during her free time.

About

Parker Shaw has a PhD in Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Pittsburgh (2015), and an MA and a BA in Spanish from the University of Utah (2007, 2005). His current research on Latin American culture focuses on ecological topics, often in connection with literature’s and film’s representations of “altered” states of consciousness. His earlier research is a literary and cultural study of varying senses of masculinities and nationality in Chilean Boy Scout manuals and magazines from the early 20th century. His research and teaching interests include cultural categories of identity such as gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and social class in canonical and non-canonical texts. He teaches upper-level courses about Latin American literature and cultures, Spanish-language classes, and general studies of Hispanic literature in English translation.

About

Amorette Sherwood holds a Master of Art and a Bachelor of Art, both in Spanish, from the University of Utah (2007 and 2005) where she was trained in Latin American and Peninsular literary studies, cultural studies and language pedagogy. She also studied at the Universidad Católica de Valparaíso. She taught beginning and intermediate Spanish language courses at the University of Utah from 2005-08, and intermediate through advanced Spanish language courses at Concord University from 2014-16. She has accompanied her university students on study abroad programs in Chile and Spain (University of Utah) and Mexico (Concord University). She began teaching at Eastern Washington University in 2016, where she teaches the 100 and 200-level Spanish courses. Her current interests include communicative language teaching, short story genre, protest music and art.