2020 Graduate Research Grant Symposium

Due to the cancellation of the 3rd annual Graduate Research Grant Symposium originally scheduled for April 2020 at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, recipients of a Sigma Delta Pi graduate research grant in 2019 have instead recorded their planned presentations as found below.

Nicole Bonino

She will receive her Ph.D. in Spanish literature from the University of Virginia in May 2020. Her area of specialty is Latin American literature, with a comparative focus on Migration Studies and an interdisciplinary interest in the field of Environmental Humanities. Within the theoretical framework of ecocriticism, her research examines the reasons why people emigrate, the ways in which they modify space and culture, and the rhetorical and metaphorical ways in which the urban and oceanic landscapes are represented in literature. She is currently a fellow of the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation, the Center for the Americas, and the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures. Bonino has published on migratory issues and ecocriticism in international peer-reviewed journals. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled Hacerse la América: hibridismos imaginados en la literatura migratoria ítalo-argentina, focuses on the Italian migration to Argentina and offers a critical paradigm for understanding past and contemporary migratory phenomena.

Presentation

Kallie McNamara

A current graduate student at North Carolina State University, she is expected to graduate in May 2020. McNamara is a NC Teaching Fellow and taught for four years at Rolesville High School before returning to NCSU to begin graduate school in the Spanish M.A. program. After graduation, she intends to continue teaching and has earned a position as a middle school Spanish teacher of 6th, 7th, and 8th grades. She is excited to put into practice the Camino-contextualized materials that she compiled for her capstone.

Presentation: Part 1

Presentation: Part 2

Falcon Restrepo

A recent Ph.D. graduate in Hispanic Linguistics from the University of Florida (2019). He will start a position as an assistant professor of Spanish and Linguistics at the College of Charleston in Fall 2020. His work addresses issues in sociolinguistics and Spanish L2 development with the use of natural language processing tools.

Presentation

Joëlle Carota

Born and raised in Italy, Carota is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish linguistics in the Department of Romance Languagesand Literatures at the University at Buffalo. She holds a Laurea Triennale (B.A.) in “Linguistic Mediation and Intercultural Communication” and a Laurea Magistrale (M.A.) in “Foreign Languages for Business and International Cooperation” both from University D’Annunzio of Chieti-Pescara and an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics from the University at Buffalo (SUNY).
She has a particular interest in bilingualism, contact linguistics, code-switching, and sociolinguistics in general. For the last five years, she has been teaching Spanish at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and Italian privately. Carota plans to defend her dissertation during the summer of 2020, and she is currently working on research projects in fields of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.