College of the Holy Cross |Latin American and Latino Studies

Isabel Alvarez-Borland, Professor, MLL/Spanish
Isabel Alvarez Borland completed her M.A. in Spanish at Middlebury College and earned her Ph. D. at The Pennsylvania State University. Since arriving at Holy Cross in 1981, Professor Borland has taught introductory and intermediate language courses as well as advanced literature seminars in Latin American Fiction. Among her most popular seminars are Literature of Exile, Immigration and Ethnicity, and Latino Autobiography, as well as a seminar on Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Professor Borland has taught Latino Literature in translation as part of Holy Cross FYP program and has been an invited faculty of the Middlebury Graduate Summer Programs in Spanish. She was a visiting professor at Amherst College during the Fall of 2004. At Holy Cross, she often coordinates the Spanish curriculum and has served the college in numerous departmental and college committees. Prof. Alvarez -Borland is the author of CUBAN AMERICAN LITERATURE OF EXILE: FROM PERSON TO PERSONA (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1998) and of Discontinuidad y ruptura en Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Hispamerica 1982. Alvarez Borland has published many articles on Cuban and Latin American authors in journals such as Hispanic Review, Hispania, and World Literature Today among others. Her interests are in the contemporary Latin American Novel, Cuban fiction and U.S. Latino Literatures.

Josep Alba-Salas, Associate Professor, MLL/Spanish
Josep Alba-Salas received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Cornell University in 2002. His research interests include Spanish and Romance linguistics, particularly theoretical syntax and second language acquisition. Among other courses, he regularly teaches 'Spanish for Business' and 'Spanish in the US: A Sociolinguistic Perspective'. He also serves as Director of Pedagogical Training for the Foreign Language Assistant Program.

Bridget Franco received her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of California, Irvine in 2009. Her research interests include 20th and 21st century Latin American literature and film, particularly from the military dictatorship and postdictatorship periods in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. She is also interested in philosophy, politics, and the visual arts as they relate to contemporary Latin American literature. Franco has lectured in the U.S. and abroad, including Puerto Rico and Mexico, and was Assistant Director of International Study Programs at the University of Notre Dame. She will serve as faculty advisor for the Hispanic Honor Society, Sigma Delta Pi, beginning in the fall of 2009.

Daniel Frost, Associate Professor, MLL/Spanish
Dan Frost completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2004, during his first year teaching at Holy Cross. He is interested in the relationship between literature, culture and the land in the nineteenth century. His book, Cultivating Madrid: Public Space and Middle Class culture in Madrid, 1833-1890 (Bucknell University Press, 2008), examines how images of public parks, gardens, and landscapes contribute to Madrid’s development as a modern capital. His writings have appeared in MLN and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and he has focused on Spain and Argentina in his teaching. He is founding editor of fósforo, Revista de Inspiración Hispánica at Holy Cross, and has been active in formalizing the semester abroad program in Lima, Perú.

Osvaldo Golijov, Associate Professor, Music
Osvaldo Golijov is a Loyola Professor of Music at Holy Cross College and is also on the faculty of Boston Conservatory. Defined by The New York Times as "a musical alchemist (who) conjures up new worlds," Mr. Golijov takes gestures and sound imagery from his own background as the points of departure for his compositions. Music from the Judeo-Christian liturgy, the western repertory of many periods, folk traditions from different places, and the inevitable Tango and other Latin American genres, appear in his work in different stages of transformation, often metamorphosing into something else entirely or even disappearing altogether from the surface. This search for a meaningful integration of widely different musical sources resulted in a longstanding collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, and in works for performers as diverse as the St. Lawrence and Cleveland string quartets, conductors Oliver Knussen and Helmuth Rilling, clarinetists Giora Feidman and David Krakauer, the Rumanian Gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks, the Mexican Rock band Cafe Tacuba, Tablas virtuoso Zakir Hussain, fiddler Alicia Svigals and singers Dawn Upshaw, Luciana Souza, Mikhail Alexandrovich, Paul Hillier, Iva Bittova and Diamanda Galas.

Esther Levine, MLL/Spanish; Assistant Dean; International Scholar and ALANA Student Advisor

Justin Poche, Assistant Professor, History

María Rodrigues, Associate Professor, Political Science
Maria Guadalupe Moog Rodrigues has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Boston University. Her areas of interest are Latin American Politics, Environmental Politics, and Politics of Development and Underdevelopment. She has published a book (Global Environmentalism and Local Politics: Transnational Advocacy Networks in Brazil, Ecuador, and India, SUNY Press, 2004) and several articles on transnational environmental advocacy coalitions, focusing on transnational activism in the Brazilian Amazon region. She also has published on indigenous peoples’ rights and privatization policies in Amazonia. Most recently, Rodrigues has focused on urban environmental problems in Brazil. Rodrigues’ Politics of Development course and syllabus is featured in the 2009 edition of Peace, Justice, and Security Studies – A Curriculum Guide, edited by McElwee, Hall, Liechty, and Garber, Rienner.

Nicolás Sánchez, Professor, Economics
Nicolas Sanchez received his Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in 1972. His specialties are Property Rights Analysis and Development Economics. His writings have appeared in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Explorations in Economic History, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Cuba in Transition, and many other journals and books. He has been elected to public office at the local level, enjoys writing popular articles for the local press and has also lectured in Mexico, Spain and Puerto Rico.

Cynthia Stone, Associate Professor, MLL/Spanish
Cynthia Stone received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1992. Her research focuses on the interplay of words and images in alphabetic, pictorial, and cinematic texts related to the Spanish-American colonial period. Her book, In Place of Gods and Kings: Authorship and Identity in the 'Relación de Michoacán' (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), highlights the process whereby new literary models were shaped in Mesoamerica in the wake of the Spanish conquest. Current research projects involve critical studies of the translation process and pedagogical approaches to teaching colonial-era topics. At Holy Cross, she has developed courses on topics including Hispanic Cultures of the Americas, Colonial Spanish American Literature, Mesoamerican Codices, and Contemporary Latin American and Latino Film. She is currently serving as Director of Latin American and Latino Studies, as faculty advisor to LASO, and as a member of the Community-Based Learning Advisory Committee. In previous years, she has served as Coordinator of the Spanish Section, Chair of the College Curriculum Committee, Officer of Phi Beta Kappa, and as a member of the Committee on Tenure and Promotion.

Jorge Valdés, Associate Professor, MLL/Spanish
Jorge Valdés began teaching at Holy Cross in 1980. He has been coordinator of the Spanish section and teaches both language and literature. He specializes in modern Spanish and Spanish-American Poetry. His publications include studies of the poetry of Luis Cernuda and Ernesto Cardenal.

Caroline Yezer, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Caroline Yezer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. Before coming to Holy Cross in the fall of 2007, she earned her B.S. in speech from Northwestern University (1991), an M.A. in anthropology from George Washington University (1996), and her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from Duke University (2007). Professor Yezer conducted her fieldwork in the Andean region of Ayacucho, Peru - an area hard-hit by the violence between the Maoist group known as “Shining Path” and the state (1980-2000). Her dissertation, entitled “Anxious Citizenship: Insecurity, Apocalypse and War Memories in Peru's Andes” works against traumatic explanations of war survivor’s lives. Instead she examines how indigenous highland villagers use militarization, born-again Christianity and the current drug war in South America to promote their own war history and to assert their rights within the nation and in the broader network of human rights and international activism. Professor Yezer will be actively involved in Latin American and Latino Studies and offering courses on Latin American ‘dirty wars’, violence and human rights, U.S.-Latin American connections, indigenous activism, illicit economies and drug wars, and field methods.